Suddenly, as only a one-time event, a large text file edited in gedit (a Gnome text editor) and read but not edited in LibreOffice Writer on openSuse 13.2 with the Gnome desktop on my refurbished debranded laptop suffered text swaps in the file's area I had been editing, too many to have been my mistypings. Text word-like strings got swapped and punctuation got swapped, but not with each other, and patterns tended to be consistent, such as when in this or that URL "://" became a space and "google.com/analytics" became "google.com.analytics". While some of this I had not edited, it was near what I had, and the rest of the 1.8MB file was untouched (I used diff to check). I'm glad I had a fresh backup for comparison. I don't think my flash drive had gotten loose and, in past experience, removing it without ejection may corrupt parts of the whole file from top to bottom at random locations, not just where I was editing. My laptop has been behaving well. The problem has not repeated. Was this just weird and forgettable or is there something I should look for as a likely cause?

Sounds like a bug somewhere. Maybe it is related to different formats and conversions between them. What format did you save from gedit?

gedit is a text editor and it offers no choice of formats for saving as, so it saves new files as *.txt only. This file has been in heavy use for, I think, years since the last save-as, with edits in various locations nearly daily. No attempt to convert between formats was attempted by me on this file anytime recently. The file has huge numbers of URLs throughout, so the string swaps that occurred in one part of the file, if they were due to a format conversion, should have occurred in many of the URLs from top to bottom, but they didn't (I checked using diff). National keyboard differences could perhaps explain punctuation swaps but not all-letter-string swaps; and I don't recall having a problem about a wrong national keyboard becoming operative. I haven't had a problem like this one since, even though I'm still using the file and the same openSuse 13.2 Linux installation with gedit, subject to changes through the frequent automatic updates.

You can change character encoding from things like UTF-8 to ISO-8859 and change the line terminator types when you "Save As" in gedit. And you can use an alternate file extension even though it will still just save it as text.

I get confused or concerned when you cite "National keyboard differences", if you're really using different language settings per system, keyboard, or on the same system and just altering settings, then this could be part of the reason why a file might be converted in translation. I fully get that people understand multiple languages or work in environments where they have to contend with the same, but to do so on the system which you're working on doesn't make sense to me. I'd stick with the most common language on the computer I used most.

And I might just chalk it up as a weird and forgettable one-time occurrence.

I didn't change the encoding, the line terminator, or the extension. And encoding and terminator errors would be at the character level, not at the level of word-like strings.

I may be using the wrong term when I wrote of national keyboard differences and it hasn't affected me in openSuse and may not have affected me in Fedora 20, but it was an issue in live Porteus, where the machine, seemingly by itself but maybe I was tapping the touchpad, would switch away from the US keyboard to some other nation's layout and I'd get unexpected output and have to switch back. But that error causes single-character swaps, not string swaps. I wish I had kept a list of the swap errors from the recent incident, but they essentially were of whole words or word-like strings, so the keyboard nationality setting couldn't have been the cause.

I'm opting to treat this as a glitch. I learned that computers have been susceptible to, literally, interstellar effects (I forgot if particles or energy quanta) for decades. I don't plan to go to the abacus or the slate, so I'll live with the glitches.

Thanks.