Ctrl+Shift in notepad.exe.
I am a keyboard-shortcut junkie; I very rarely use the mouse or touchpad for commands that can be replicated using keystrokes. I do a lot of typing, and it slows me down to have to take my hands away from the keyboard to locate a mousepointer and perform an action. Whenever I can avoid it, I do. This applies to all of the basic and general keyboard shortcuts for manipulating text, including copying, pasting, bolding, applying italics, whatever, but also to cursor and selection manipulation using the Ctrl and Shift keys combined with the arrow keys.
This is all very well and good and rather boring, but I have discovered something odd and I cannot figure it out. I tend to compose blog posts in notepad, to avoid the autoformatting I have configured in Word for longer client documents. I use the same keystrokes in notepad, but have noticed that sometimes when I go to select text using Ctrl+Shift+[Right Arrow] or [Left Arrow], the entire body of text in the notepad window becomes right-aligned. To date, I had been unable to recreate this behavior intentionally. More interestingly, after this happens, pressing the right arrow moves the cursor to the LEFT, and pressing the left arrow moves the cursor to the RIGHT. No keypad combination seems to change things back to normal, and I end up copying the entire body of text and pasting it into a new notepad window to return the world to its senses.
Today--just twenty minutes ago, in fact--I have discovered what causes the problem. To see it for yourself:
Go to Start|Run, type notepad, and press Enter.
Type a few words.
Press Ctrl down and then press Shift. (Interestingly, the behavior does not appear if you press Shift and then Ctrl.)
Ta da! Experiment with moving the cursor by clicking the left and right arrow keys. Weird, isn't it? Frustrating is a better word, to be honest. It is as if my notepad window has been transported into an alternate dimension where everything is just backwards.
The point of this post is really to publish a plea. If anything out there can explain why this happens and, more importantly, how I can pull the notepad window back into my dimension rather than moving the text, I would be very appreciative.