TextEdit in Ventura scrolls randomly while typing text in RTF documents

There is another community post called “TextEdit cursor bugs” that describes this, but it's already closed for replies. This is not so much a question as it is an observation and a hint to anyone suffering from the same problem.

The problem: while editing certain RTF documents in TextEdit, the window spontaneously scrolls to various positions while typing. In some cases it always jumps to the top of the document. In other cases it will jump back and forth between the position where I am typing and some other position further up. The result is that I cannot see what I am typing and it makes editing those documents almost impossible.

This only happens with certain documents, it seems that lists and perhaps especially nested lists, will more easily trigger this bug.

This was not present in older versions of Mac OS. I recently upgraded from Mojave to Ventura (after finally letting go of my last 32-bit app). The same documents that now exhibit problems were perfectly fine in Mojave.

There are other annoying new bugs, like text falling outside the window while typing at the end of the document and TextEdit not automatically scrolling to reveal what you're typing, until you press an arrow key or manually scroll down. Lists will sometimes become invisible. Even plain text mode has a bug where it is possible to scroll beyond the end of the document by alternatively pressing the Home and End keys. I have found reports of these bugs elsewhere, it is not just me.

Things I have tried:

• Unplugging all USB input devices and closed the SteelSeries Engine mouse driver. Makes no difference. There are no Bluetooth devices that could cause this, Bluetooth is turned off on my machine 99% of the time. This bug has nothing to do with input devices.
• I created a brand new user account and tried using TextEdit inside it. The bugs also show up there.
• No, I have never ever installed anything like CleanUpMyMacAndSecretlyInstallSpywareJunk™.
• Sent feedback through the Apple site, in spite of all the reports that say this is futile as far as TextEdit bugs are concerned.
• I have installed Bean, a free text editor that seems to be based on the same framework as TextEdit hence also allows to edit RTF and RTFD documents, only then done right. So, I can edit all my existing RTF(D) files and make new ones, in a much better way than ever before. Did I mention it's free? There is not even a donation link on the page. The mind boggles.

Where did this go so wrong? I reckon the TextEdit source code, which apparently still stems from the NeXT era, is so old that no modern developer can grok it. The fact that TextEdit only offers to save HTML files as HTML 4.01 and XHTML, shows that it has never really been updated since the beginning of the millennium. The QA done on TextEdit source code modifications, seems woefully inadequate. I reckon that the tests (if any) only consist of performing a small number of tasks in some very simple documents, not huge reports full of nested lists. (And certainly not tables, those have always been awful.)

From my 30-ish years of experience with Apple products, I have seen apps suffering from a similar kind of ‘rot’ and I don't believe Apple will care to fix this particular problem. This is merely speculation from my part, but I expect them to ditch TextEdit as we know it in some future release instead.

Long story short: if you are in the same boat as me, install Bean and don't look back. You can change the default app to open RTF and RTFD documents through the Get Info window in Finder.