Ctrl+A should select all for quick highlighting, but does not. Ctrl A S D F gives SOH, DC3, EOT, and ACK.

I keep doing this to myself and it keeps annoying me that it doesn't work.

As a note, those are control characters. On Windows, control + shift + a gives the SOH control character, so you likely have a stuck shift key. Try tapping each one to unstick it and try again.

Thank you for taking the time to create this issue, as we're no longer supporting versions below 1.12, I'm going to go ahead and close it but if this bug seems to continue over to newer versions, please do report it again so we can investigate the issue further.