Author Topic: AceText - text & clipboard manager (for coders, writers, etc.) (Read 73261 times)

rjbull · « **Reply #25 on:** September 13, 2006, 09:44 AM »

It's a feature that allows you to preconfigure quickpaste items which, in essence, allows you to apply a text replacement/cleanup filter/query on text on the fly. You can preconfigure and save them, then use them as simply as hitting ctrl alt q and selecting the one you want from a drop down.
-allen (September 13, 2006, 06:01 AM)

I see, thanks. So it's a bit like Boxer Software's TextMonkey (limited free version, much more powerful payware version), or the freeware Clippy which is primarily aimed at tidying up e-mail, but can do more in the latest beta. But you'd evidently have a hard time matching all AceText's features in a single program, especially at lower cost.

mouser · « **Reply #26 on:** September 14, 2006, 06:07 AM »

just a clarification in case its not clear, the quickpaste feature allen describes is from Clipboard Help+Spell. You can create as many custom formatting profiles as you want and they appear in the quickpaste menu and in the formatting panel in the main window.

rjbull · « **Reply #27 on:** September 14, 2006, 06:23 AM »

just a clarification in case its not clear, the quickpaste feature allen describes is from Clipboard Help+Spell. You can create as many custom formatting profiles as you want and they appear in the quickpaste menu and in the formatting panel in the main window.
-mouser (September 14, 2006, 06:07 AM)

Thanks, Mouser, I had indeed thought Allen was referring to AceText. In the meantime, though, I've been wondering why you called the feature QuickPaste. It looks to me like SmartPaste or IntelliPaste might have been better names, it they weren't taken already by someone else?

You might like to take a quick look at Clippy for its e-mail munging abilities. The latest beta has search-and-replace built in, as well as the older features.

mouser · « **Reply #28 on:** September 14, 2006, 06:39 AM »

in this case it's called quickpaste because at the top of the menu are recent clips for pasting; it's on the bottom that you see these formatting options (which format whatever is in the clipboard and then quickly paste it).

allen · « **Reply #29 on:** September 14, 2006, 06:56 AM »

While AceText does have a feature called QuickPaste, it's more what the name implies -- it brings up acetext and hitting enter/double clicking on a clip immediately sends it back to the application, it's pretty quick. But lacks the clip alteration of CHS's quickpaste.

Sorry for the confusion -- I have both acetext and CHS running -- the former as my primary clipboard extender/note keeping and the latter for its QuickPaste goodness.

rjbull · « **Reply #30 on:** September 15, 2006, 06:16 AM »

Thanks for clearing up the confusion

I see that the latest beta of Kana Clip, another freeware clipboard extender, also has plenty of formatting-on-the-fly features. Looks like a growing category.

rjbull · « **Reply #31 on:** September 15, 2006, 06:22 AM »

If AceText is to some extent an information manager, how good are its search features? Does it have Boolean search or regular expressions?

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #32 on:** September 15, 2006, 06:58 AM »

From the AceText help file ...

Click the Search Options button in the lower right corner of the AceText Editor or AceText Tower, or press Ctrl+F3 on the keyboard, to toggle various options affecting the search and replace commands in AceText.

Regular Expression

Turn on this option if you want to search for a regular expression rather than for a simple word or phrase.

Dot Matches Newline

When searching for a regular expression, you can turn on this option to make the dot match all characters, including line breaks. By default, the dot matches all characters except line break characters.

Case Sensitive

Turn on this option to make AceText treat the uppercase and lowercase variant of the same letter as different characters. When the "case sensitive" option is on, the search term "dog" will only match "dog". It won't match "DOG" or "Dog" or "DoG". When the option is off, searching for any of these 4 variants will find all 4.

Adapt Case

When the "case sensitive" option is off, you can turn on the "adapt case" option to make AceText adapt the case of the replacement text to that of the search term. E.g. when searching for "dog" and replacing with "cat", AceText will replace "Dog" with "Cat" and "DOG" with "CAT" when the "adapt case" option is on. If the option is off, all matches of "dog" regardless of their capitalization will be replaced with "cat", as you entered it. AceText recognizes and adapts to all uppercase (SEARCH TERM), all lowercase (search term), first capital (Search term) and first capital for each word (Search Term). If the search match uses another kind of capitalization, the replacement text is not adapted, and used as you entered it.

Whole Words Only

By default, AceText will find all occurrences of the search term, even if as a part of another word. E.g. searching for "cat" will match the first three letters in "category". If you turn on the "whole words only" option, "cat" will only match the word "cat". "Category" won't be matched.

All Clips in This Collection

By default, the Find First, Find Previous, Find Next, Replace Current and Find Previous, Replace Current and Find Next and Replace All commands only work on the active clip. If you turn on the "all clips in this collection" option, they'll search through all clips in the collection. Note that Find First Clip, Find Previous Clip, Find Next Clip and Filter Clips always search through all clips in the collection, regardless of this option.

All Clips in All Collections

By default, all search commands only work on the clips in the active collection. Turn on "all clips in all collections" to search through all the clips in all the collections that you have opened in AceText.

Loop Automatically

Turn on this option to make the search restart from the beginning (or the end when searching backwards) when the search term cannot be found.

These are just the Options you can select.

You can also filter finds and apply similar stuff to search and replace.

Regular expresions use the same syntax as PowerGREP and RegExBuddy (which is not surprising as they were written by the same person) and so combines well with those apps - but youcan simply use your own RegEx too.

There is also a graphical calendar which can be used to filter searches by date.

rjbull · « **Reply #33 on:** September 16, 2006, 04:18 PM »

From the AceText help file ...
-Carol Haynes (September 15, 2006, 06:58 AM)

Thanks, Carol... regular expressions are nice, but I'd need Boolean searching before I'd consider it an information manager. But that's not its focus, of course.

eschen · « **Reply #34 on:** September 19, 2006, 03:22 AM »

While AceText does have a feature called QuickPaste, it's more what the name implies -- it brings up acetext and hitting enter/double clicking on a clip immediately sends it back to the application, it's pretty quick. But lacks the clip alteration of CHS's quickpaste.

Sorry for the confusion -- I have both acetext and CHS running -- the former as my primary clipboard extender/note keeping and the latter for its QuickPaste goodness.
-allen (September 14, 2006, 06:56 AM)

Thanks Allen for this post. It underlines what I wanted to say in my post. The quickpaste is pretty cooler than what AceText does to reuse recent stuff you copied in the clipboard.

Regards Rainer

srdiamond · « **Reply #35 on:** May 23, 2007, 12:14 PM »

Loss of clipboard connection is a problem most of the clipboard managers have not addressed, but is completely avoided by a few. Clipmate and the new ClipCache automatically detect disconnection and re-establish it. I have never had a disconnection problem with them. AceText and AccelClip, otherwise my favorites, have not completely resolved the disconnection issue, although AceText has recently included technology that avoids disconnection caused by hibernation. To me, disconnection is a particularly annoying problem, and I'm not sure why more clipboard managers haven't included the technology available in ClipMate and ClipCache to eliminate the problem. Does this technology perhaps consume a lot of resources? Finally, does Clipboard Help and Spell include technology to avoid disconnection?

Quick Paste Menu, Quick Paste Menu, Quick Paste Menu . . . just that feature would make a killer standalone app. Having a clipboard manager wrapped around it helps. As clipboard applications tend to sometimes lose their connection to the clipboard, having two apps comes in handy -- I've yet to have both lose touch at the same time.
-allen (September 11, 2006, 05:34 PM)

tomos · « **Reply #36 on:** May 24, 2007, 02:37 AM »

In Clipboard Help and Spell -

Options > Clipboard >
has an option -

"Re-establish clipboard periodically"

rjbull · « **Reply #37 on:** May 27, 2007, 12:01 PM »

ArsClip also has clipboard break detection and repair. It's a tad trigger-happy - it once gave me the message that "arsclip" had broken the chain

but the program works well.

rjbull · « **Reply #38 on:** June 03, 2007, 03:18 PM »

Has anyone compared AceText with CodeSector's MemoClip?

cthorpe · « **Reply #39 on:** June 04, 2007, 09:14 PM »

Loss of clipboard connection is a problem most of the clipboard managers have not addressed, but is completely avoided by a few. Clipmate and the new ClipCache automatically detect disconnection and re-establish it. I have never had a disconnection problem with them.
-srdiamond (May 23, 2007, 12:14 PM)

Don't know about that. I've had Clipmate lose it's connection on me. It's really annoying when I've clipped a lot of things in succession while counting on Clipmate to powerpaste them into something else. It's rare, but it does happen.

Babis · « **Reply #40 on:** April 02, 2008, 02:13 AM »

Thanks for the review, I tried acetext for 3 days and I am really impressed. I have a couple of questions though:

- can I make "live spell check" to work on capitalized words?

- can I make it to beep or make whatever sound when a clip is copied to the clipboard, in order to be sure that the clip has been copied?

- about search: every time I close and reopen acetext, the search options are reset and I have to mark the checkboxes "all clips in all collections" etc. Is this for real, that I have to set the search options every time I launch the program?

Other than that, it is really excellent with great interface and shortcuts with way faster response than clipmate.

mitzevo · « **Reply #41 on:** April 02, 2008, 02:26 AM »

Hi Babis, yeah AceText is a really great program

To answer your questions in one answer, sorry I don't know

but for sure you can email the program author and ask, and request new features, etc. and usually you'll get a quick response.

I've played with clipmate minimally, but yeah, clipmate does a whole lot of other stuff, AceText just deals with plain text.. Although some RTF wouldn't hurt

) .. It gets a bit boring looking at just the plain text and feels like a mess.. maybe its just me..

xbeta · « **Reply #42 on:** May 18, 2008, 10:00 PM »

2009-09-03 update:
Editpad has fixed this bug.
EditPad Lite 6.5.0 - 1 September 2009, Word wrap: Allow text to be wrapped after any ideograph, even if there is no whitespace.
and the author said in email: The next free minor update of AceText will get the same fix.

a small bug in Chinese (maybe also other double byte characters) when it auto wrap:
it try to change to a new line at a "space", but this is not a good rule in Chinese.
see what happened at the tab, which is at the beginning of a paragrap.
notepad OK, Acetext bug.

other Chinese users can have a test.

道可道，非常道；名可名，非常名。无名天地之始，有名万物之母。
故常无欲以观其妙，有欲以观其窍。此两者同出而异名，同为之玄，玄之又玄，众妙之门。

superboyac · « **Reply #43 on:** April 14, 2011, 11:59 AM »

I'm becoming more and more impressed with Acetext. brilliant app from that guy, as usual.

rjbull · « **Reply #44 on:** April 14, 2011, 04:18 PM »

I'm becoming more and more impressed with Acetext. brilliant app from that guy, as usual.
-superboyac (April 14, 2011, 11:59 AM)

I think he used to offer a deal if you bought licenses for EditPad Pro and AceText at the same time.

superboyac · « **Reply #45 on:** April 14, 2011, 05:07 PM »

I'm becoming more and more impressed with Acetext. brilliant app from that guy, as usual.
-superboyac (April 14, 2011, 11:59 AM)

I think he used to offer a deal if you bought licenses for EditPad Pro and AceText at the same time.
-rjbull (April 14, 2011, 04:18 PM)

I may just have to do that for my business. I like both of them very much.

mitzevo · « **Reply #46 on:** July 29, 2011, 11:18 AM »

How you getting on with AceText superboyac?

superboyac · « **Reply #47 on:** July 29, 2011, 03:01 PM »

How you getting on with AceText superboyac?
-mitzevo (July 29, 2011, 11:18 AM)

I haven't really committed to it yet. But I probably will soon (I'm in the middle of to many things right now). It's very similar to mouser's Clipboard Help+Spell, which is free. I'm trying out the CHS beta rightnow. They both have pros and cons. There's something I just like about the Aceclip interface. But CHS is more powerful and does a couple of things better, and the beta added a couple of features I really like (icons in the quick paste). One thing I want in CHS is to add more of whatever the SQL options are intended to do as regular buttons and checkboxes in the options menu.

So I'm kind of playing around with both right now.

mitzevo · « **Reply #48 on:** July 31, 2011, 03:58 PM »

Yeah, AceText is pretty nice, but I'm a little dissapointed in the lack of updates or upgrades to it, in the last 3 years atleast. I requested some functions to the author but I just got canned responses (

) that he would consider my requests in future versions of AceText, lol.

I requested some small things like text modifiers (conver to rot13, hex, binary, etc.), also a way to set a tabs color, as well as a few more really small things.

CHS is damn great though, kudos to mouser for another wicked free donationcoder software product.

rjbull · « **Reply #49 on:** August 03, 2011, 02:43 PM »

I requested some small things like text modifiers (conver to rot13, hex, binary, etc.), also a way to set a tabs color, as well as a few more really small things.

CHS is damn great
-mitzevo (July 31, 2011, 03:58 PM)

And you could add some of the things you want to it as external applications, if they aren't built in already.