Sort Collection

Click the Sort button on the main toolbar or select Sort in the Collection menu to change the order of the clips in the collection.

AceText can sort clips in various ways. The “A to Z” options sort alphabetically, character by character. “A10” sorts before “A4” because 1 sorts before 4. The “A to Z and 0 to 9” options sort alphanumerically. They sort numbers logically. When the text contains numbers that consist of multiple digits, the numbers are compared as a whole. So “A4” sorts before “A10” because 4 is less than 10. This sort order is also known as “natural sort”.

When comparing folders, alphabetic and alphanumeric sort always use the folder label. When comparing folders with clips, they use the folder label or clip label. If a clip doesn’t have a label, then the first 250 characters of the clip’s contents are used. When comparing clips, you can choose whether to compare the label or the AceType abbreviation. If you select to compare the AceType abbreviation and two clips in the same folder don’t have an abbreviation or they have the same abbreviation, then those two clips are compared by their labels instead.

You can also choose to sort clips by their dates. For clips, this compares the date that you can set in the AceText editor. For folders, sorting from older to newer compares the dates on the oldest clip in each of the folders. Sorting folders from newer to older compares the dates on the newest clip in each of the folders.

When the collection is sorted, you can choose whether folders should be mixed with clips. If you do, folders are compared with clips as described above. If a folder contains clips and subfolders, then subfolders may appear before, between, and after clips, depending on how they compare. Alternatively, you can choose to sort all the subfolders before or after all the clips in a folder. Then the “sort clips” option is only applied to clips. You can then make a separate “sort folders” choice that determines how folders are compared with each other.

You can choose to apply the sort order to the entire collection. The Sort Collection button is the only way to apply a sort order to an entire collection. If you turn this off then the sort order is only applied to the selected folders. You can change the sort order of a single folder directly by using the drop-down lists in the AceText Editor. This way you can sort one folder differently from the rest of the collection (or not at all).

Tick “keep clips and folders sorted in this order when they are edited” to save your chosen sort order in the collection or in the selected folders. Untick this if you want the sort order to be applied just once. If you previously ticked this option and then change the sort order again without this option, then the previously saved sort order is removed.

Tick “set all subfolders to sort like their parent folders” if you want to remove any sorting options from the folders in your collection. This ensures that the entire collection is sorted in the same way.