AceText™ Version History

Software Quality at Just Great Software

Don't let the long lists of issues on this page make you think our products have a lot of problems. Quite to the contrary. All the bugs listed below are bugs that we have fixed. Many of these are corner cases reported by only one or perhaps a handful of our customers. Other software companies often don't spend any effort addressing such issues, much less list them publicly. We take pride in producing high quality software, and often release free updates to ensure you won't have any problems with our software.

Your purchase also comes with one year of free major upgrades. So don't worry if there might be a new major upgrade around the corner just because it's been a while since the last major upgrade. If there is one around the corner, you'll get it free, without having to ask. (But you can keep the old version if you prefer.)

If you ever hit a snag with AceText, check here if you have the latest version. If you do, simply report the issue via email and we'll help you out as soon as we can.

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AceText 2.1.7 - 9 October 2009

Improvements:

Search: Pressing Enter when the search box has keyboard focus finds the next search match.
Word wrap: Allow text to be wrapped after any ideograph, even if there is no whitespace.

Bug fixes:

AceText's icon next to the system clock now reappears automatically when Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) crashes or is forcibly terminated and then restarted.
ClipHistory: AceText lost its ClipHistory if it was password-protected, and AceText was shut down without unlocking the ClipHistory.
ClipHistory: AceText sometimes caused applications that violate Microsoft's rules for the Windows clipboard by opening and closing the clipboard multiple times for a single copy operation (including Adobe Reader and Microsoft's own Excel) to show error messages about being unable to open or clear the clipboard.
Clip|Move Up: In an unsorted collection, moving a clip or folder upward when it is the first child in a folder did not make the clip a sibling of its parent folder as it should but placed it as the last child into the sibling folder of the parent folder.
Collection|Save triggered an Invalid Class Typecast error when the Clipboard or Recycle Bin tab was active.
Double-clicking file:// URLs did not always open the file.
Search: Incremental search using the search box on the AceText Tower either focused the AceText Editor after each keystroke, or caused an error if the AceText Editor wasn't visible.

AceText 2.1.6 - 27 March 2009

This release fixes one bug introduced in version 2.1.5. The Find First, Find Previous, and Find Next buttons triggered an access violation error when not using regular expressions. The error did not cause AceText to crash or malfunction, but did get annoying very quickly.

AceText 2.1.5 - 9 March 2009

New feature:

RSS reader: Ability to specify a proxy server.

Improvements:

Portable installation: The list of collections previously open should survive changing drive letters.
Preferences, Operation: Change the size limitation of text captured to the ClipHistory to a setting in kilobytes rather than in characters. The upper limit is now 32,767 KB (or 32 MB) rather than 32,767 characters.

Bug fixes:

Replace Current and Find Next button did not interpret special tokens in the replacement text in regular expression mode.
Spell check: Installing spell check dictionaries did not work on a portable installation running under Windows Vista if no spell check dictionaries were installed yet.

AceText 2.1.4 - 17 September 2008

Improvements:

AceType: If AceType automatically switched to the "all collections" tab, it should switch back to the previously active tab when done.
Drag and drop: When dragging clips or text into another application with the Shift key held down, the text or clips are now moved (i.e. deleted from AceText) rather than copied.
Drag and drop: When dropping files with the Alt key held down, insert the full path to the file into the clip rather than the file's contents.
Parameters: AceText now remembers the size and position of the parameters screen.

Bug fixes:

ClipHistory: AceText sometimes failed to capture text copied by applications that violate Microsoft's rules for the Windows clipboard by opening and closing the clipboard multiple times for a single copy operation (including Microsoft's own Excel).
Search: Matches in the URL of web snippets were not highlighted, causing the search to get stuck if you tried to do a "find next".
SequencePaste: When copying items to the clipboard in another application during SequencePaste, AceText would add the items to the sequence instead of starting with a new sequence if the items were copied right after the last item in the previous sequence was pasted.
Vista: If you typed in new text for a clip with the shift key held down, and that caused the clip's sorting position in the collection to change, an Access Violation error would occur.

AceText 2.1.3 - 23 January 2008

New features:

The parameter substitution screen that appears when pasting a clip with a parameter like %PARAM% now has a button to ignore all parameters, and paste the clip "as is".
Keyboard shortcuts F6, Shift+F6 and Ctrl+F6 for Find Next Clip, Find Previous Clip and Find First Clip.
Setup: Create Portable Installation directly from the self-extracting setup. The Install on Removable Drive menu item in the Help menu was renamed for consistency.

Improvements:

Activating an encrypted collection will now automatically give keyboard focus to the password field.
The menu bar will now automatically display itself without images when a screen reader is running, so the menu bar can be a standard menu rather than an owner-drawn menu. Owner-drawn menus don't work well with screen readers.

Bug fixes:

AceType: A needless beep sounded when pressing Enter to paste the clip after typing in the abbreviation.
Clip|Duplicate Clips and Clip|Move Clips no longer show read-only and locked collections as available destination collections.
Dragging and dropping a clip into a locked collection would silently overwrite the existing collection with the dropped clip. AceText will now refuse drops on locked collections.
If another application messed up the clipboard viewer chain in a particular way, AceText could crash with a stack overflow.
Toggling the visibility of the AceText Tower or Editor window would make it visible on the same monitor as the other window, instead of leaving it on the monitor where it was last time.
Using Collection|Save As on a locked collection (i.e. one asking for its password) caused an "access denied" error. AceText will now disable this menu item until the collection is unlocked.

AceText 2.1.2 - 9 October 2007

Improvements:

AceText will now check every minute whether it is still connected to the clipboard, and repair the connection if needed. AceText needs this connection to automatically grab text you copy to the clipboard into the Windows clipboard. Due to the Microsoft's poor design of the clipboard system, an application that misbehaves or crashes can break the clipboard connection of all other applications.
If the option to open collections as read only is turned on in the Operations section of the Preferences, then AceText will now automatically revert all open collections to read only mode when the PC goes into standby or hibernation.

Bug fixes:

Collections were not automatically reloaded when switching back to AceText from another application.
In rare circumstances, AceText would get stuck in a loop of access violation errors for no apparent reason.
Replace All: If the current collection did not contain any clips at all, and the option to search through all clips or all collections was off, a harmless access violation error would occur.

AceText 2.1.1 - 17 April 2007

Improvements:

The Enter key now pastes clips when the list or tree with clips has keyboard focus; Ctrl+Enter still works everywhere.
ClipHistory: Automatically reconnect to the clipboard after the computer resumes from suspension or hibernation.
Collection|Print should print the contents of the clipboard when the Clipboard tab is active, just like Text|Print Text does.

Bug fixes:

Calendar month and year were not readable when Windows is using the Windows Classic color scheme.
Print: AceText would hang when trying to print a very large collection.
Search: Find previous and replace previous now become disabled when regular expressions are enabled and the option to search through all clips is off. This makes it clear that regular expressions cannot search backwards.
Search: Pasting into the Search or Replace boxes did nothing.
Vista: Checkboxes and buttons in dialog boxes no longer disappear when you press the Alt key.

AceText 2.1.0 - 9 January 2007

Improvements:

Clip|Create Clip from Text File now sets the clip's date to the file's last modification date, rather than to the date file was added to the collection (i.e. now).
Drag-and-drop: Dragging text from a web browser into the clip tree (creating a new clip, as opposed to dropping it into the text of an existing clip) now creates a "web snippet" clip referencing the source URL. This only works if the browser provides the URL as part of the dragged selection. Internet Explorer 6 and FireFox 2 do so for http: URLs, but not for https: URLs.
Help|Install on Removable Drive: Option to force AceText to treat any drive as a removable drive. This allows AceText to be installed in a portable fashion on USB hard disks and other devices that report themselves as fixed disks.
Text|Save Text: Allow a character encoding to be chosen for the text file in the Save dialog, instead of always saving as UTF-16 Unicode.
The preview of the final clip in the screen for substituting parameters now applies word wrap.
Vista: Installing spell check dictionaries now works properly under Windows Vista with User Account Control enabled.

Bug fixes:

AceType: Pressing the AceType hotkey in another application did not reset the AceType function and bring AceText forward if the previous AceType operation was not completed.
Drag-and-drop: When dropping files dragged from another application into a clip, AceText always inserted the contents of the first file dropped during the current AceText session.
Pressing tab to indent a selection of multiple lines did not respect the tab size setting in the preferences.
Text|Limit Line Length no longer turns off word wrapping.
The "browse" button next to the URL for web snippets did not immediately become active when entering the URL.

AceText 2.0.4 - 2 November 2006

New feature:

Preferences, Files: Locking collections when closing AceText to the tray is now optional, and off by default

Bug fix:

Password-protected collections were not saved properly when closing AceText with a password-protected collection opened but still locked (i.e. with a red tab). This problem occurred in version 2.0.3 only.

AceText 2.0.3 - 25 October 2006

New feature:

TextPad Clip Library (*.tcl) files can now be imported. Select Collection|Open in the menu, and then select *.tcl in the file type drop-down list. The file must have a .tcl extension for AceText to interpret it as a TextPad file.

Improvements:

All password-protected collections except the ClipHistory are now locked when closing AceText (keeping it active in the system tray).
AcePaste can now paste before and after clips into non-AceText-aware applications even when no text is selected in the target application. AceText will wait one second for the application to copy the selection.

Bug fixes:

Auto append (ClipHistory): AceText would pop up a harmless but annoying access violation error message when an application copied something to the clipboard without a plain text alternative.
Changing the label of a clip (or the text of an unlabeled clip) while clips were being sorted and filtered caused an access violation.
Deleting a clip did not properly add the clip to the undo history, making it impossible to undo the deletion.
Pasting text when no clip was active caused an access violation error. Now, the Paste command will be disabled if there's no clip to paste it in.
Replace All command did a case sensitive search when that option was off, and vice versa.
Typing in a new regular expression while filtering caused the regex to be treated as literal text until the filteirng was turned off and then on again.
Word wrap: Turning off word wrap does not make a horizontal scroll bar appear in the edit box for the clip's text.

AceText 2.0.2 - 22 July 2006

Improvement:

Lock password-protected collections again when Windows goes into standby or hibernation

Bug fixes:

Collection|Delete Collection did not work unless the collection was opened in read only mode
Format|Limit Line Length did not work
Format|Reflow Paragraphs did not work
When using AcePaste or AceType to paste a clip with parameters into an AceText-aware application like EditPad Pro, AceText would prompt for the parameters but then paste the clip without substituting the parameters

AceText 2.0.1 - 26 June 2006

Improvement:

Install on Removable Drive: AceText now gives you the option to copy over the ClipHistory, and will always save the ClipHistory and Recycle Bin on the removable drive, regardless of what you set in the Files Preferences.

Bug fixes:

Collection|Print caused an access violation error.
If the Clipboard tab was active in AceText, and the Clip Collection pane had been used in EditPad Pro, EditPad Pro would show a "catastrophic failure" error message. The error was actually completely harmless.
Install on Removable Drive: While AceText properly copied over its settings to an .ini file on the removable device, it still used the registry when run from the removable device.
Share AceText Collections: The Settings button worked only once during each AceText session.

AceText 2.0.0 - 20 June 2006

New features:

All Collections: Ability to sort the clips in the All Collections tab.
All Collections: Ability to switch to the collection that contains the selected clip
Calendar: Button on the search toolbar to show a calendar below to the clip tree. Only clips with a date inside the date range selected on the calendar are shown.
Clip kind: Web snippet. Text with an associated URL. When copying text in Internet Explorer, the ClipHistory automatically grabs the URL from the clipboard
Collaboration across the LAN allowing one person to edit a collection with many people viewing it. AceText now keeps a lock on all .atc files it has open. If a second person opens the same file, the file is automatically opened in read only mode. The first person can right-click on the collection's tab to turn on read only mode, allowing somebody else to turn it off. Read only collections are automatically reloaded if changed on disk when switching tabs or re-activating AceText.
Date/time stamp on each clip
Empty Recycle Bin command to the Recycle Bin's tab's right-click menu
Feed reader: An AceText folder can now be set to retrieve its clips from an RSS or Atom feed. Supports RSS 0.9x, 1.0 and 2.0 as well as Atom 0.3 and 1.0
Feed writer: An AceText folder can now be set to write the clips it contains in into an RSS feed, and save the feed to file and/or upload it by FTP
Help|Install on Removable Drive
Menu bar exposing all of AceText's functionality
Password-protected collections (including ClipHistory and Recycle Bin). Right-click on a tab and choose Set Password to password-protect the collection. When opening a protected collection, AceText will not show any of its contents until the password has been entered. When opening the protected .atc file in a text or hex editor, it is recognizable as a password-protected AceText collection, but nothing further can be deducted.
Placeholders to be substituted when pasting a clip. E.g. entering %CUSTOMERNAME% in a clip will prompt you for the name of the customer when pasting. Also support auto-filled snippets like %CURDATE%, %CURTIME%, %CURDATETIME%, %CLIPDATE%, %CLIPTIME%, %CLIPDATETIME%, %CLIPBOARD%, %CLIPHISTORY1%, %CLIPHISTORY2%, %CLIPHISTORY3%, ... If a clip with its label set to %PARAM% exists in the same collection, then %PARAM% is automatically substituted with that clip's contents. If a clip contains only auto-filled snippets, the user is not prompted to provide values. Parameters ending in DATE, TIME, DATETIME, FILECONTENT and FILENAME show date/time and file selectors rather than a text box when AceText prompts for parameters.
Preferences, Appearance: Ability to change the font used by the clip tree.
Preferences, Apperance: Show the menu bar, the toolbars, or both.
Preferences, Applications: Allow specific applications to be ignored when keeping track of the last active application to send clips to
Preferences, Applications: ClipHistory can be set to ignore clips copied by certain applications, such as password managers
Preferences, Applications: Configure paste keystrokes for target applications (e.g. Shift+Insert or Alt+E, P instead of Ctrl+V). Default configuration for the windows command shell.
Preferences, Applications: Option to make Before & After clips work with non-acetext-aware applications by making the application copy the text to the clipboard first. For unconfigured applications, the default is to enable before+after support and to use Ctrl+C to make the application copy the selected text
Preferences, Cursors: The mouse pointer used for the editors to edit the clips is now fully configurable
Preferences, Files: Open collections in read-only mode
Preferences, HotKeys: AceEdit hotkey. Forces the active application to copy the text to the clipboard, activates the Clipboard tab in AceText, and pastes the edited text back into the application when AceText is closed.
Preferences, Hotkeys: Allow the Windows key on the keyboard to be used for the system-wide hotkeys. Key combinations including the Windows key are most unlikely to conflict with key combinations used in other applications
Preferences, Hotkeys: Option to always make the AceType hotkey work on all collections
Preferences, Operation: Focus Label box instead of Text box when adding a new clip
Preferences, Operation: Insert Clip From File: Use the full path, or only the file name, as the clip's label.
Preferences, Operation: Update the date/time stamp when a clip is edited
Preferences, Operation: When double-clicking or pressing Ctrl+Enter on a clip that consists solely of a URL, open the URL in a web browser.
Preferences: Tab size, and option to insert spaces instead of tab characters.
Print Text command in the Text menu for printing a single clip.
Print: Headers and footers with information about the collection or the clip being printed
Print: Turn on the "selection only" checkbox to print only the selected folders and clips
Reformat Text: Delete duplicate lines
Search: Regular expressions, search-and-replace, highlight matches, incremental search, etc.
Share clip collections
Sort folders: Specify a sort option (like parent, unsorted, caption, date) and direction (ascending, descending) for each folder, so folders can be sorted in a different way than the collection they're in
Split Clip: Split the clip into multiple clips along a particular delimiter or regex match, or extract regex matches from a clip
Unicode: AceText now stores snippets as Unicode, allowing it to capture text in any language
Unlimited undo and redo

Improvements:

AceType: When one clip has abbreviation "abc" and another "abcde", select the "abc" clip when "abc" is typed, even if "abcde" is above the "abc" clip in the collection
Clip Tree: * key on the numeric keypad now collapses the current node and all this children if the node and all its children are already expanded
Clip Tree: / key on the numeric keypad will expand all folders in the tree if one or more of them aren't expanded yet; if all folders are expanded, the / key will collapse them all
ClipHistory: Flash the tray icon whenever a clip was captured
ClipHistory: When copying part of a clip's text to the clipboard in AceText, the ClipHistory will no longer capture the copied text. Entire clips copied to the clipboard were already and still are ignored.
ClipHistory: When copying something to the clipboard in AceText, check if AceText is still connected to the clipboard, and automatically reconnect if not
Proxy server settings for downloading spell check dictionaries are now remembered between AceText sessions
SequencePaste: When copying text to the clipboard when SequencePaste is active in the ClipHistory, the newly copied items become the SequencePaste range. This allows you to keep SequencePaste active to easily copy multiple items from one application to another, without having to switch to AceText
Sort order is now maintained when dragging and dropping clips
Sort: Clip collections can now be sorted in reverse alphabetical order, by the AceType abbreviation, and by the clips' date/time stamps.
When switching between collections, keyboard focus should stay on the tower or clip tree if it was there already
XML-based file format with XML schema makes it easy to programatically read or write AceText collections

AceText 1.1.4 - 17 March 2006

Improvements:

Opening the ClipHistory or Recycle Bin files no longer opens those files into a new collection tab, but simply activates the built-in ClipHistory or Recycle Bin tab.
Spell checker: The button to download spell check dictionaries now also lists dictionaries that don't use the Western European code page.

Bug fixes:

ClipHistory: Ctrl+Click did not allow a selected clip to be deselected.
Preferences, Files: When selecting "never purge recycle bin", the next time the preferences screen is opened, none of the recycle bin options are selected.
Spell checker: With some spell check dictionaries, words enclosed with multiple quote characters like '''test''' were flagged as misspelled.

AceText 1.1.3 - 8 August 2005

Improvement:

AceText Tower: remember the height of the list of collections in the tower

Bug fixes:

Activating the AceText Editor via the toolbar or tray icon menu caused a harmless "invalid class typecast" error when the Recycle Bin tab is active.
Activating the AceText Editor via the toolbar or tray icon menu caused a harmless focus error when the ClipHistory tab is active, and the ClipHistory is empty.
All Collections: After closing all collections and emptying the ClipHistory, the last selected (but now gone) clip or folder remains selected in All Collections, causing Access Violation errors
Copying something in FireFox and certain other applications with the Clipboard tab active in AceText sometimes caused a "cannot open clipboard" error. (FireFox opens the clipboard multiple times in a single copy operation, which is against Microsoft's guidelines for the Windows clipboard.)
Dragging and dropping multiple clips between collections no longer concatenates all clips into a single clip when one or more of the clips contains a URL.
Typing in a new label for a clip sometimes incorrectly updated the clip and its folder in the clip tree when the option to sort clips alphabetically is on.

AceText 1.1.2 - 23 February 2005

Bug fix: SequencePaste caused an access violation if only one clip was selected (version 1.1.1 only).

AceText 1.1.1 - 11 February 2005

New features:

Preferences: Editor background color can now be configured.

Improvements:

Right-clicking on a clip in the tree now selects it before showing the context menu. This way you can quickly perform an action on a clip with the mouse.
SequencePaste: When a single folder is selected, SequencePaste will now cycle through the clips in that folder, rather than the whole collection.

Bug fixes:

Spell checker user word list is now properly synchronized between EditPad Pro and AceText when both are running at the same time.

AceText 1.1.0 - 17 November 2004

New features:

ClipHistory: If another application breaks the Windows clipboard chain, the ClipHistory stops working. Right-click on the ClipHistory tab and select "reconnect to the Windows clipboard" to restore AceText's connection with the Windows clipboard.
Word wrap toggle button. When working with clips containing source code snippets or other line-based data, you can now turn off word wrap.

Improvements:

Focus Clip Tree (Ctrl+F9) now focuses the AceText Tower when it is visible, even when the Clipboard tab is active and therefore the clip tree is invisible.
Width of the clip tree (when not using the AceText Tower) is now synchronized between the collections and saved when closing AceText.

Bug fixes:

Draging and dropping a clip from the ClipHistory into another collection keeps the text of that clip visible in the ClipHistory tab
Move Down (Ctrl+Shift+Arrow Down) did not work in the ClipHistory
Move Up skipped a folder when moving up an item that had two empty sibling folders above it.
Searching and filtering now search through the clip labels case insensitively, instead of case sensitively.
Tab key now inserts tabs into the clip, rather than activating the next control.

AceText 1.0.2 - 9 September 2004

New features:

Preferences, Operation: Option to make the hotkey for activating AceText hide AceText if the hotkey is pressed while AceText is already the active application.
Right-click menu for each tab with options to close, save, print, rename or delete the collection.

Bug fixes:

ClipHistory no longer loses its selection when switching tabs while the AceText Tower is visible.
Double-clicking a clip to paste it directly into an application and automatically hide AceText will no longer cause the clip to be moved when activating AceText again.
Live spell checking was not updated immediately after changing the language or adding a word to the word list.
Spell checker language selection does not persist after shutting down and restarting AceText.

AceText 1.0.1 - 16 August 2004

Last week's limited release of AceText went very smoothly. Version 1.0.1 brings a number of minor fixes and enhancements, making AceText ready for prime time.

AceText 1.0.0 - 9 August 2004

First limited public release of AceText.

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Page last updated: 09 October 2009
Site last updated: 27 January 2010