Merge Clips

The Merge Clips button is only available on the collection toolbar when the ClipHistory tab, the All Collections tab, or an AceText Collection tab is active.

Click the Merge Clips button on the collection toolbar or press Ctrl+G on the keyboard to merge or group all selected clips into a single clip. You will be asked which characters, if any, you want to use to delimit the pieces of text from the original clips in the merged clip. You can select one of the common delimiters, or type in whatever text you want to use as a delimiter. If you do not use a delimiter, the pieces of text are put into the merged clip one right after the other, without any space between them.

If some of the clips that you want to merge may have extraneous line breaks or whitespace then you can choose to trim leading and trailing line breaks or whitespace from those clips before merging them. This does not affect the original clips if you choose to keep them. It only ensures that there is no whitespace between text from different clips in the merged clip other than your delimiter.

You can also choose where you want to store the merged clip. The first option, “replace the original clips”, deletes the selected clips from the collection and inserts the merged clip in their place. All the other options leave the selected clips in place. The options “before the first original clip” and “after the last original clip” insert the new clip into the collection before or after the selected clips. The option “on the clipboard” copies the merged text to the clipboard without adding it to the collection and without automatically pasting it anywhere.

The last option, “send to target application”, uses the merged clip to complete an AcePaste or AceType operation if you pressed either of those hotkeys in another application prior to merging the clips. Otherwise, it sends the merged clip to the last application that was active before you switched to AceText to merge the clips. Sending the merged clip to the target application may or may not put it on the clipboard, depending on whether you configured AceText to send keystrokes to that application.

You can also choose a sort order for merging the clips. This does not move the original clips in the collection. It only affects the order in which the text of the original clips is put into the merged clip. If the selection includes folders, then “sort flattened list of clips” sorts the clips in those folders as if those clips weren’t in folders at all. With the other options, clips are sorted within their folders and merged in the order of the folders that contain them.

Click the downward pointing arrow next to the Merge Clips button to quickly merge clips using one of the common delimiters. Doing so always replaces the merged clips and merges them using their present order.

See Manage and Arrange Text to learn how to use AceText.