TextEdit claims it has no permissions to access a folder?

[Andrew Brehm]

For the past few years on all my Macs, TextEdit keeps popping up a message box informing me that

"You don't have permission to write to the folder that the file "xxxx.rtf" is in."

(with the file name changing appropriately).

It does this usually when I type backspace, but not when I actually do save the file. What makes this even more mysterious is that I DO have permission to write to the folder that the file is in. In fact when I click "save", it saves the file there without issues.

Why is TextEdit trying to save the file when it's not supposed to?
Why does it fail?
Why does it tell me about this?

 

[Just_Me_D]

I've never experienced anything like that and I pretty much use a Mac every day. With that being said, what macOS or OS X version are you running on your Macs?

 

[Andrew Brehm]

This has been happening for a few years on all my Macs with all versions of macOS including the current one.

Did you try it out? Start TextEdit, write something, save the file (on the desktop best), then add to the file and save occassionally, then type backspace to delete a line and it should show up.

It happens to a lot of people, Google finds thousands of hits.