New Strafe keyboard getting me into overtype mode regularly

Hi All. New here. I did search the forums and found nothing, so I am posting. If I missed the answer please point me there and accept my apologies.

 

I recently acquired a Strafe keyboard for my 14.04 Ubuntu Linux system. 64 bit. Nothing fancy. I have no specific keyboard driver installed... just letting things work by default.

 

What's weird is that I regularly find myself stuffed into overtype mode and have no idea how I got there. Most often - and perhaps only there - I find this in gmail. Suddenly the mouse will only select at least one character - rather than drop the cursor between characters - and when you type it replaces characters rather then inserts them.

 

Searching around I found a way out, but it makes no sense to me: CAPS LOCK + Insert. That will (usually) get it reset back to insert mode.

 

I cannot find anything online that explains this behavior, or how to avoid it. This did not happen with my previous keyboard. The only thing that changed is the keyboard itself.

 

And I swear I saw this problem once, years and years ago. I might be wrong, and even if I am right I cannot recall the details, but I suspect this has happened to me at least once before.

 

Has anyone else seen this? Anyone know what I am doing, or how to avoid it, ideally permanently?

 

I did try disabling the CAPS LOCK key from within Linux, and that didn't help. Problem still happens.

 

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

I should add... the obvious fix would be just to hit the insert key all by itself, but that does not correct this problem. No matter how many times I try using just insert to get out of overtype mode, that doesn't work. I have to use caps-lock & insert. No clue why. And yes, I've experimented with Alt & Ctrl & shift & Windows & FN... nothing seems to help except caps-lock & insert.

 

Also note that it is not the insert key that is causing this. I am not accidentally hitting that key. It's well out of the way on the Strafe and there is no way I am accidentally hitting it.

 

I think that is all I know. Happy to answer questions and try things if anyone has any advice.

Any chance you can test the keyboard on another computer? Are you able to reproduce the issue on that computer?

I can try, but it's not as simple as I'd like. The other computers I have are different OS choices (ChromeOS and Win 10) which complicates things. But big issue is that I don't know what it is that puts me into overtype mode. It's like it is some combination of perfectly normal keys that I happen to be hitting at the same time, or something, and that causes the problem. If I knew what it was, I'd have more to search for to figure out the problem, and might have resolved it already.

 

Anyway, I can try to reproduce this on another computer in the next day or two. We'll see what I can figure out.

 

Thanks for the suggestion.