What’s New in AceText 4

Installing AceText 4 replaces any previous version you may have installed.  You don’t need to uninstall the older version first.  If you decide you don’t like AceText 4, you can downgrade to your previous version by installing it over AceText 4.

The Advanced Options button in the installer now gives you a choice between installing AceText for all users and installing for the current user only.  The latter option enables a proper installation of AceText with desktop icons, file associations, and COM integration without requiring administrator privileges.  Changing from an installation for all users to one for the current user only does require you to uninstall and then reinstall.

Existing Collections and Settings

If you install AceText 4 over a previous version, AceText will ask you if you want it to import your settings from the previous version.  You can do so if you spent time to set up custom hotkeys and/or applications in AceText 3 or prior and you don’t want to repeat that.  If you’ve been running AceText 3 mostly with its default settings, then you should tell AceText 4 to start with its default settings.

If you do import your settings, you can choose whether AceText 4 should automatically open the collections you had open in AceText 3.  AceText 4 will read collection files saved by all older versions.  But AceText 3 and prior cannot read collections that were modified by AceText 4.  Therefore, AceText 4 has an option to automatically make a backup copy when it overwrites a collection that was saved by a previous version.  You can choose whether AceText should do this when you tell it to automatically open your old collections.  You can toggle the backup option afterwards on the Files page in the Preferences.  You will need those backup copies if you may need to go back to AceText 3 after using AceText 4.

Appearance

The most apparent change in AceText 4 are the new toolbar icons.  The new flat look of the icons better matches the flat look of Windows 10.  AceText includes them in 10 different sizes that cover all the scaling increments from 100% to 400% available in the basic display settings in Windows.  AceText can now correctly scale its toolbars on all PC and laptop displays, including small laptops with 4K screens.  Toolbar icons can now be switched between small, medium, and large sizes on the Appearance page in the Preferences.

AceText has a new dark theme that makes AceText’s entire user interface use white text with black and dark gray backgrounds.  You can toggle this theme with the Options|Dark Theme menu item.

You can customize the mouse pointer on the Cursors page in the Preferences.  You can now have a different pointer over selected text.  Custom mouse pointers now support sizes larger than 32x32 when DPI scaling is set to 200% or more, supporting DPI scaling up to 400%.  If you select a custom mouse pointer with inside and outside colors then those colors are also used for the mouse pointer that indicates scrolling when you click the editor with the mouse wheel.  This scrolling cursor now supports all resolutions between 100% and 400% display scaling.

Syntax Coloring and Color Palettes

AceText now supports syntax coloring.  It includes all the schemes that are included with EditPad 8.  You can also download custom syntax coloring schemes created for EditPad Pro by clicking the Download button on the Appearance page in the Preferences.  If you purchase a license to AceText 4, you get the syntax coloring scheme editor as a bonus feature.

You can select a syntax coloring scheme for each clip.  You can set a default syntax coloring scheme for automatically captured clips on the Applications and Windows pages in the Preferences.  There you can also choose whether AceText should paste text with syntax coloring as RTF or HTML and which color palette it should use.  This way you can paste formatted text with a white background for printing into your word processor even while using a dark theme in AceText.

A new clip kind called “text with emphasis” lets you apply some of the colors of the syntax coloring palette to arbitrary parts of your clip.  This lets you make text bold and italic, for example.  By using named colors from a palette instead of hard-coding red/green/blue values, you can use one set of colors in AceText and paste with another set of colors appropriate for each target application.

Paste Pure Text

While adding syntax coloring and text with emphasis, AceText 4 also improves support for situations where you want to ensure that only plain text is pasted.  Even when text has syntax coloring or emphasis in AceText, it is only pasted as formatted text in RTF or HTML into those applications or windows for which you specifically enable that in the Preferences.

If another application places RTF or HTML or anything else onto the clipboard besides plain text, you can now use the new AcePure hotkey to paste only plain text.  This works between any two applications.  Copy in one application as you normally do, switch to the other application, and press the AcePure hotkey to paste the plain text on the clipboard directly into the other application.  AceText removes all clipboard formats other than plain text from the clipboard and (optionally) sends a paste command to the active application.  You can configure this on the HotKeys page in the Preferences.

Automatic Capture

Automatically capturing text can now be enabled and disabled via a toolbar button on the ClipHistory page instead of via a preference.  This lets you quickly disable automatic capture when you’re about to copy something sensitive.  You can still disable automatic capture for specific applications in the preferences.  But that doesn’t work so well for things like browser plugins or web apps that don’t have their own executable or window handle.  You can now use the toggle button for those.

There is also a new Auto Split button that splits automatically captured text into multiple clips.  The Operation page in the Preferences has some new options such as playing a sound upon automatic capture and not capturing blank or duplicate clips.

Export and Print

You can now export your AceText collections or selected clips and folders into plain text files, comma-delimited files, tab-delimited files, and even HTML files.  You can choose which kinds of clips should be exported and which parts of those clips should be included.  There are options for creating separate files for each clip or each clip folder.  Or you can export the whole collection into one big file or even into a new clip.  When exporting to HTML, you can choose a palette to preserve syntax coloring.

When printing, you can now similarly choose which kinds of clips and which parts of those clips that you want to print.  You can print in black and white or choose a palette to print with syntax coloring.

Keep Your Secrets

While exporting and printing are great, some of your clips may be a little more sensitive.  You can now designate any clip as a secret.  AceText does not show the contents of secret clips unless you click the Reveal button.  The secret is hidden automatically after a configurable number of seconds (unless you’re busy editing the secret).  When you use AcePaste to transfer a secret to another application, AceText always does so by simulating keyboard shortcuts.  It does not transfer secrets via the clipboard as that would make it all too easy for other applications to snoop on your secrets or even for them to be accidentally pasted more than once.

Secrets can only be added to password-protected collections.  AceText now uses a much stronger key derivation method that is resistant to brute force attacks (someone running a program to try every password you might be using).  Because of this, there is a noticeable delay when you unlock a collection with your password.  If you opened multiple collections that are locked with the same password, you can now tell AceText to try to unlock all collections when entering the password for one of them.  AceText will unlock them simultaneously, using one CPU core to decrypt each collection.

When setting a password for a collection, you now have the option to set the same password for all other open collections too.  This also uses one CPU core per collection to generate the keys simultaneously.  Even when two collections have the same password, they still get a unique encryption key.

Searching and Regular Expressions

The search options now include separate options for persisting the options and remembering previous search terms when restarting AceText.  You can also choose which parts of each clip that AceText should search through or filter on.  Highlighting search matches now works on all parts of the clip, including the label and URL (if you select them in the search options).  Replace All can make replacements in folder labels and folder URLs.  You can enable or disable those separately from clip labels and clip URLs in the search options.

AceText’s regular expression engine has been upgraded to the “JGsoft V2” engine that is also used by EditPad 8 and PowerGREP 5.  This brings many new features, including subroutines, recursion, balancing groups, branch reset groups, and tokens for matching horizontal whitespace, vertical whitespace, and line breaks.  AceText now applies syntax coloring to regular expressions and replacement strings in the Search and Replace boxes and in other places where AceText asks you for a regular expression.

Straight Quotes, Smart Quotes, and Primes

AceText can now convert between straight quotes, smart quotes, and primes.  Straight quotes are the ASCII single and double quotes, and optionally the ASCII backtick and less-than and greater-than signs.  Smart quotes are the “typographical quotes” as well as «guillemets», 《angle brackets》, and 「corner brackets」.  Primes are the proper symbols for inches, feet, minutes, seconds, etc.  5′8″ is five feet eight inches.

AceText can convert straight to smart quotes, smart to straight quotes, any quotes to primes, primes to straight quotes, and any set of smart quotes to any other set of smart quotes.  You can independently configure the opening and closing quotes.  Predefined styles include “outward commas“, „inward commas“, “high commas“, „low and high commas“, «outward guillemets», »inward guillemets«, 《angle brackets》, 「corner brackets」, and 『white corner brackets』.  EditPad also knows the difference between a single quote and an apostrophe, even at the start of a word.  2019 with the century omitted is correctly written as '19 with an apostrophe.  Most word processors get this wrong.  AceText gets this right.

If your syntax coloring scheme supports it, AceText can also convert between straight and smart quotes according to its rules.  The provided HTML schemes, for example, convert straight quotes to smart quotes only outside HTML tags.  AceText can do this conversion as you type or on demand on the selected text.

Text Layout

AceText now better supports modern programming fonts like Fira Code and Hasklig that can form ligatures of ASCII characters.

Complex script text layouts previously supported most ASCII ligatures.  Now they also support ligatures with parentheses and angle brackets.  They work correctly with all fonts that support ASCII ligatures.  Ligatures remain when they are partially selected or when syntax coloring applies different colors to the characters that form the ligature.

The monospaced left-to-right text layout previously did not support ASCII ligatures.  Now it does.  But it only works correctly with fonts like Fira Code and Hasklig that use one glyph per character even for ligatures.  It does not work with fonts like DejaVu Sans Code that use one glyph per ligature.  Ligatures are broken (showing the original characters) when they are partially selected or when syntax coloring applies different colors to the characters that would have formed the ligature.  This text layout no longer clips italic overhang at the end of words or at color changes, as was already the case for other text layouts.  As a consequence of supporting ligatures this way, the monospaced left-to-right text layout now disables automatic font substitution.  Only characters supported by the font will be displayed.

The non-monospaced left-to-right text layout still allows Windows font substitution, and does not support ligatures.  Complex script text layouts now always use the main font for visualized spaces and generic line breaks.

All text layouts now have independent options for treating underscores, hyphens, other punctuation, currency symbols, math symbols, and/or symbols as word characters.

Text copied via the clipboard normally shouldn’t contain control characters other than tabs or line breaks.  But when it does, those control characters would often be invisible in previous versions of AceText because most fonts can’t display them.  Now the text layout configuration allows you to choose how AceText should visualize control characters.  The options that use letter pairs (like NU for NULL), hexadecimal numbers, or Control+Letter indicators work regardless of the font.  Other options like the IBM PC glyphs or Unicode glyphs do depend on the font.  The “Editor: Control characters” color in the color palette allows you to show control characters in a different color or apply an underline or strikeout to mark them as inappropriate for clipboard text.