Capture, Enter and Store Text

AceText provides you with a central location to store snippets of text. A piece of text is called a “clip” in AceText parlance. A single clip can contain a word, a sentence, a page of text, or the complete works of Shakespeare.

AceText supports several different kinds of clips. Most of the time, you will work with plain text clips. The other kinds are useful in conjunction with AceText-aware applications.

• Plain text: An ordinary piece of text, compatible with all software applications.
• Rectangular text block: A rectangular block of text, or a column selection. AceText-aware applications recognize AceText’s rectangular format. AceText also supports the clipboard formats for rectangular blocks used by the Visual Studio and Embarcadero IDEs. This allows you to copy and paste rectangular blocks beteen AceText and applications that support these formats. Other applications will treat the clip as several lines of plain text.
• Before and after text: Two pieces of plain text, where the “before” part is intended to be inserted in front of another block of text, and the “after” part behind it.
• Text with emphasis: Text that allows you to change font styles and highlight colors to add emphasis.
• Binary data: Text containing non-printable characters, displayed in hexadecimal format in AceText. AceText-aware applications can paste the bytes directly. Other applications will see a hexadecimal representation of the bytes on the clipboard. Most hex editors will interpret this correctly, allowing you to paste the actual bytes.
• Secret: A secret clip stores plain text. But AceText doesn’t show you the text unless you click the Reveal button. Only collections protected with a password can store secret clips. The actual contents of the clip are plain text. You can send secret clips directly to another application without revealing the secret if the other application can accept keystrokes without revealing them. An input field for a password, for example, fits that bill.

Clips are stored in AceText Collections. To start with a new collection, click the New button on AceText’s main toolbar. To continue working with an existing collection, click the Open button. AceText will automatically and regularly save your collection files (unless you turned this off in the Files preferences). This way you never have to worry about losing any clips.

There are many ways to add text as a new clip into AceText.

Directly Type In Text

If the text you want to store in AceText is not stored anywhere on your computer yet, you can simply type it in directly into AceText. Click the New Clip button in the Collection toolbar, or press F4 on the keyboard. Then click inside the large text box, or press Alt+T on the keyboard, and start typing.

Copy And Paste

Copy and paste is the traditional way to transfer text between different applications, and is supported by all software. Simply copy the text to the clipboard. To paste it into AceText as a new clip, click the Paste as New Clip button in the Collection toolbar, or press Shift+Ctrl+V on the keyboard. To paste the text into an existing clip, select the clip, click inside the text box or press Alt+T on the keyboard, and then press Ctrl+V to paste.

Copy Without Paste, Via The Cliphistory

By default, AceText will automatically grab all text that you copy to the clipboard, regardless of the application you copied it from, while AceText is running. AceText is running when the AceText icon is visible next to the system clock. Each time you copy some text, a new clip is added to the top of the ClipHistory. You can add one or more of those clips to a collection by clicking on the ClipHistory tab, and then clicking the Duplicate Clips or Move Clips button, or pressing Ctrl+D (duplicate) or Ctrl+M (move) on the keyboard. Finally, select the collection to move or duplicate the clips into.

Using the ClipHistory is much handier and quicker than manual copy and paste if you want to store several snippets of text in quick succession into AceText. The ClipHistory also enables you to retrieve or paste a clip that you copied to the clipboard a long time ago, and was already removed from the clipboard by subsequent copy operations. By default, the ClipHistory stores the last ten thousand clips. You can configure the ClipHistory’s automatic capture in the Operation Preferences, and manual capture in the Hotkeys Preferences.

You can configure the automatic capture in the Operation Preferences, and manual capture in the Hotkeys Preferences.

Drag And Drop

Drag and drop is a very easy and direct way to transfer text using the mouse only. Unfortunately, quite a lot of software does not support drag and drop between itself and other software. This method is well-suited to grab text from a web page while surfing, or from a PDF file while reading in Acrobat. First, select the text. Then click inside the selection, hold the mouse button down, and move the mouse pointer over the AceText window. If AceText is invisible, move the mouse pointer over AceText’s taskbar button (the button, not the icon next to the system clock), and AceText will pop up after a short delay. If you move the mouse pointer on top of a tab while dragging, that tab will become active.

To drop the text as a new clip into AceText, either drop it on the collection’s tab, or on the tree with clips at the left hand side in the AceText Editor, or in the AceText Tower. If you drop it inside the text box, the text will be inserted into the current clip, at the position where you dropped it.

Opening Files

If the text is already stored in a text file on your computer, click the Create Clip from Text File button in the Collection toolbar, or press Shift+Ctrl+O on the keyboard. Select the file, and its contents will be added to the collection as a new clip, using the file’s name as the label. If you select more than one file, they will all be added in separate clips.

If you want to add all the files from a folder then use Create Folder from Disk.