Often, a clip will need editing before storing it permanently, or before sending it to another application. AceText can perform many common transformations with a single command:
Case Conversion: Convert casing of the text of a clip, or the selected part of the text. You can convert all characters to uppercase or lower case, capitalize the first letter of each word (title case), or invert the casing when you’ve been typing with Caps Lock on. Some of the syntax coloring schemes that you can select for a clip let you automatically adjust the case to the rules of the syntax coloring scheme.
Quote Conversion: Convert between the straight quotes that you can type on your keyboard, the smart quotes that are used in print, and primes that indicate units such as inches. Some of the syntax coloring schemes that you can select for a clip specify rules for straight and smart quotes so that the conversion doesn’t break the syntax of the clip.
Tab Conversion: Convert between tabs and spaces.
Character Conversion: Convert between characters and character escapes or character entities representing those characters.
Reflow Paragraphs: If you want to edit text that uses fixed line lengths, use the Reflow Paragraphs command to remove the line breaks that were used in place of word wrapping. The paragraphs will then rewrap nicely when you edit the text in AceText or send it to an application that supports word wrapping (most Windows applications do). Email messages, newsgroups postings, and text files from old DOS systems or mainframes, often use fixed line lengths.
Limit Line Length: Before sending text to an application that expects fixed line lengths, use the Limit Line Length command. This does the opposite of the Reflow Paragraphs command, inserting line breaks to limit the maximum line length. AceText will only break lines between words, and not in the middle of a word, so some lines will end up shorter than the maximum length you specify. If you want, AceText can compensate for that by inserting additional spaces. When the text is viewed with a fixed pitch font such as Courier, the text will appear to be aligned to both the left and right margins.
Comment Block: Add or remove characters from the start of the line that turn the line into a comment. This is mainly useful for clips containing source code snippets.
Quote Block: In email messages and newsgroup postings, it is common to quote previous messages by prefixing each line of the previous message with a special character, typically >. AceText can automatically add or remove those characters from the start of each line to quote or unquote blocks. After unquoting a block you can use the Reflow Paragraphs command to make the text automatically rewrap when you edit it.
Sort: Sort the lines in a clip alphabetically or alphanumerically.
Trim Whitespace: When selecting text in a document or a web page, it takes quite a bit of effort to make sure no superfluous whitespace characters end up in the selection. When using AceText, you don’t have to worry about this. Just capture the text, and use Trim Whitespace to remove extraneous spaces and blank lines at the start and the end of the clip.
Trim Whitespace from Paragraphs: If a clip has superfluous white space at the start and/or end of the lines or paragraphs in the text, use Trim Whitespace from Paragraphs to delete it. E.g. when copying a table from a web page, the resulting text is often needlessly indented by the web browser. Trim Whitespace from Paragraphs takes care of this.
Delete Duplicate Lines: Delete duplicate items from clips containing lists.
Delete Blank Lines: Delete all lines that are totally blank from a clip.
Consolidate Blank Lines: Replace each block of consecutive blank lines with a single blank line in a clip.
The box that displays the text of the active clip is a full-featured edit control. In fact, it is the same edit control that powers EditPad, one of the most flexible and convenient text editors available today (see https://www.editpadpro.com).