Search Options

Click the Search Options button on the Search toolbar of the AceText Editor or the AceText Tower, or press Ctrl+F3 on the keyboard, to toggle various options affecting the search and replace commands in AceText.

Regular Expression

Turn on this option if you want to search for a regular expression rather than for a simple word or phrase.

Free-Spacing

When searching for a regular expression, you can turn on this option to tell AceText to ignore whitespace in your regular expression.

Dot Matches Line Breaks

When searching for a regular expression, you can turn on this option to make the dot match all characters, including line breaks. By default, the dot matches all characters except line break characters.

Case Sensitive

Turn on this option to make AceText treat the uppercase and lowercase variant of the same letter as different characters. When the “case sensitive” option is on, the search term “dog” will only match “dog”. It won’t match “DOG” or “Dog” or “DoG”. When the option is off, searching for any of these 4 variants will find all 4.

Adapt Case

When the “case sensitive” option is off, you can turn on the “adapt case” option to make AceText adapt the case of the replacement text to that of the search term. E.g. when searching for “dog” and replacing with “cat”, AceText will replace “Dog” with “Cat” and “DOG” with “CAT” when the “adapt case” option is on. If the option is off, all matches of “dog” regardless of their capitalization will be replaced with “cat”, as you entered it. AceText recognizes and adapts to all uppercase (SEARCH TERM), all lowercase (search term), first capital (Search term) and first capital for each word (Search Term). If the search match uses another kind of capitalization, the replacement text is not adapted, and used as you entered it.

Whole Words Only

By default, AceText will find all occurrences of the search term, even if as a part of another word. E.g. searching for “cat” will match the first three letters in “category”. If you turn on the “whole words only” option, “cat” will only match the word “cat”. “Category” won’t be matched.

All Clips in This Collection

By default, the Find First, Find Previous, Find Next, Replace Current and Find Previous, Replace Current and Find Next and Replace All commands on the AceText Editor only work on the active clip. If you turn on the “all clips in this collection” option, they’ll search through all clips in the collection.

The Find First Clip, Find Previous Clip, Find Next Clip and Filter Clips commands that you find on the AceText Tower always search through all clips in the collection, regardless of this option.

All Clips in All Collections

By default, all search commands only work on the clips in the active collection. Turn on “all clips in all collections” to search through all the clips in all the collections that you have opened in AceText.

Prompt Before Replace All

If you turn this on then the Replace All command shows an “Are you sure?” dialog box before it does anything. If you turn on the options to replace all clips in all collections then you may also want to turn on the option to prompt before replacing to make sure you don’t accidentally replace across all open collections if you forget to turn off that option when you no longer need it.

The dialog box that asks you to confirm the Replace All command also lets you toggle the “All Clips in This Collection” and “All Clips in All Collections” options so you can disable them just-in-time. It also lets you turn off the prompt and choose which clip parts to make replacements in. If you toggle any options on the “Are you sure?” prompt then your new options will be used by all search commands until you change them again.

Loop Automatically

Turn on this option to make the search restart from the beginning (or from the end when searching backwards) when the search term cannot be found.

Folder and Clip Parts

You can select which parts of the clips and the folders in your collections should be affected by the search commands. If you untick a part then AceText won’t find any matches in that part. The part won’t be affected by a search-and-replace.

AceText can search through folder labels, clip labels, AceType abbreviations, the contents of text clips, the contents of binary clips, and the URLs of clips and folders. These are basically all the parts of clips and folders into which you can freely enter text or binary data.

Persist Search Options

If you turn on “persist search options” then AceText remembers your search options when you shut down and restart AceText. Be careful with this. You could be in for an unpleasant surprise when clicking the Replace All button when AceText remembers but you forgot that “all clips in all collections” was turned on last time you used AceText. Undoing that would require you to click the Undo button in each open collection.

If you turn off “persist search options” then AceText always starts with the default search options. Those have all the folder and clip parts turned on and all other options turned off.

Persist Search History

When you right-click the Search or Replace box you can select a recently used search term or replacement string. If you turn on “persist search history” then AceText preserves those two history lists when you shut down and restart AceText. If you turn this off then the history lists are blank when you restart AceText. You should turn it off if your search terms may contain sensitive information.

AceText always preserves the “persist search history” option itself when you restart AceText even if you turn off “persist search option”. So you can independently choose whether the search options and the search history should be preserved.