Don’t let the long lists of issues on this page make you think our products have a lot of problems. Quite to the contrary. All the bugs listed below are bugs that we have fixed. Many of these are corner cases reported by only one or perhaps a handful of our customers. Other software companies often don’t spend any effort addressing such issues, much less list them publicly. We take pride in producing high quality software, and often release free updates to ensure you won’t have any problems with our software.
Your purchase also comes with one year of free major upgrades. So don’t worry if there might be a new major upgrade around the corner just because it’s been a while since the last major upgrade. If there is one around the corner, you’ll get it free, without having to ask. (But you can keep the old version if you prefer.)
If you ever hit a snag with AceText, check here whether you have the latest version. If you do, simply report the issue on the forum and we’ll help you out as soon as we can.
AceText 4.0.0 introduced the Options|Dark Theme menu item that lets you switch AceText between the standard (white) Windows theme and AceText’s new dark theme. If Windows itself is using its dark theme when you run AceText 4 for the first time then AceText defaults to its dark theme. In AceText 4.2.0 we introduced a bug that caused AceText to use light colors for its tabs and clip tree when AceText defaulted to its dark theme. This has been fixed so the dark colors are initialized correctly on first run. The fix does not automatically restore the correct colors if you upgrade from 4.2.x to 4.2.3. If your copy of AceText uses the dark theme with light colors for the tabs and clip tree then you can fix this by using the Options|Dark Theme menu item to switch to the light theme and then again to switch back to the dark theme. Toggling the theme toggles the colors if you haven’t changed them from the defaults.
AceText can write RSS feeds if you add a folder to a collection and change the folder’s kind to RSS feed writer. All clips you put inside the folder are written to the RSS feed. Click the Settings button to tell AceText to write the RSS feed to a file or to upload the feed via FTP. FTP upload was broken in AceText 4.2.0. This functionality has now been restored.
AcePure is an AceText feature that removes all clipboard formats except plain text from the clipboard. If you have copied some text from a web browser, for example, you can use AcePure to paste the text into a word processor without using the fonts and other formatting from the web page. On the Hotkeys page in the Preferences you can configure AcePure to paste the text on the clipboard directly into the active application. Even if you disable the hotkey itself, you can still invoke AcePure by right-clicking AceText’s icon in the notification area on the Windows taskbar. Doing so no longer makes AcePure paste the text on the clipboard into AceText. (Right-clicking AceText’s icon makes AceText the active application.)
AceEdit is an AceText feature that lets you use the Clipboard tab in AceText to edit text in another application. Pressing this hotkey makes AceText simulate a copy command in the active application and then activate itself to show the copied text on the Clipboard tab. When you’re done editing the text you can send it back to the other application by pressing the AceEdit hotkey again or by clicking the AcePaste Now button on AceText’s toolbar. Completing the AceEdit operation this way was previously broken. This has been fixed. Switching away from the Clipboard tab or AceText itself no longer automatically completes AceEdit.
See also: AceText 4.2.3 version history
AceText 4.0.0 introduced the Options|Dark Theme menu item that lets you switch AceText between the standard (white) Windows theme and AceText’s new dark theme. Doing so unfortunately caused AceText to lose its connection to the Windows clipboard. This caused the ClipHistory to stop capturing text copied to the clipboard. Toggling the Operation|Automatic Capture menu item did not fix this. It also caused AcePaste and AceType to incorrectly paste “before and after” clips. The only workaround was to shut down AceText and restart it. This has now been fixed so that you can switch themes at any time and have the ClipHistory and all other features continue working normally.
AceText 4.0.0 also introduced the ability to export collections into plain text, comma-delimited, tab-delimited, or HTML files. This release fixes several bugs that caused errors or caused only some of the clips to be exported with certain combinations of settings in the Export Collection dialog. If AceText needs more than 1 second to export the collection, which it may when exporting many thousands of clips into separate files, then it now shows a progress meter. This makes sure AceText does not appear unresponsive or hung. The progress meter has an Abort button that stops AceText from exporting any further clips. Aborting the export does not delete any files that were already exported.
Several other minor bugs were also fixed. The version history has the complete list.
This release brings a number of bug fixes.
In AceText 4.2.0 we added a New Subfolder button next to the New Folder button to give you more ways to add the new folder where you want it without having to move the added folder. We changed the behavior of the New Folder button to always add the new folder as a sibling of the selected folder. Unfortunately, we also introduced a new bug. The New Folder button would fail with a “list index out of bounds” error when used on a collection that was entirely empty. This has been fixed. Both the New Folder and New Subfolder buttons can be used now to add a new folder to an empty collection.
Using the Collection|Read Only menu item to turn off read-only mode for a collection now counts as the collection having been used at that moment. This ensures that the option to automatically make collections read-only after a certain period of inactivity that we added to the Files Preferences in AceText 4.2.0 will not immediately make the collection read-only again if you hadn’t otherwise interacted with that collection.
Using the Paste As New Clip button when a clip is selected now respects the sort order of the folder or collection containing the selected clip when inserting the pasted clip.
The Search box at the bottom of the AceText Editor is now properly synchronized between the Clipboard tab and the other tabs, between the Clipboard tab and the AceText Tower, and between the Clipboard tab and RegexBuddy or RegexMagic when launching those applications from AceText.
This release brings a number of key improvements.
AceText now supports the ExcludeClipboardContentFromMonitorProcessing and CanIncludeInClipboardHistory clipboard formats for copying and (not) automatically capturing clips, in addition to the “Clipboard Viewer Ignore” clipboard format that it has supported for many years. If another application copies text and adds one of these flags to the clipboard then AceText will not capture that text in its ClipHistory, regardless of your settings. Some password managers such as KeePassXC use this flag. AceText adds these flags to any text that it copies to the clipboard, to avoid unnecessary duplication of clips if you use AceText alongside another clipboard manager (if the other clipboard manager supports at least one of these flags).
The New Folder button is now joined by a New Subfolder button to give you more ways to add the new folder where you want it without having to move the added folder. If you want to put multiple clips and/or folders into a new folder, select them and use the New Folder button like before. If you want to add a subfolder to an existing folder, select that folder and click the New Subfolder button. When only one folder is selected, the New Folder button now adds the new folder as a sibling above the selected folder instead. When only one clip is selected, the New Folder button adds the new folder as a sibling above the clip instead of below like it used to. Use the New Subfolder button to add a subfolder as a sibling below an individually selected clip.
The Appearance Preferences have a new option to give the AceText Tower and AceText Editor separate taskbar buttons. Previously AceText always used a single taskbar button. Separate taskbar buttons are useful if your PC has multiple monitors and you’ve configured Windows to display a separate taskbar on each monitor. If you place the AceText Tower and AceText Editor windows on separate monitors then the separate taskbar buttons can follow their own window to the taskbar on the same monitor. But if you always have the two windows on the same monitor then it may be annoying to have two taskbar buttons for one application, particularly if you are using an older version of Windows that does not automatically combine taskbar buttons that belong to the same application. Because of these considerations, the option is on by default on a PC running Windows 10 or 11 with multiple monitors. It is off by default on a PC running an older version of Windows and on a PC with only a single monitor.
Separating the taskbar buttons can also have an impact on how desktop enhancement applications that let you switch between or move around applications treat AceText. They may or may not treat the AceText Editor and AceText Tower as separate windows depending on whether they have separate taskbar buttons. If you find that AceText doesn’t play well with a desktop enhancement application you’re using then try toggling the option for separate taskbar buttons and restart AceText to see if that solves the issue.
The Files Preferences have a new option to automatically make collections read-only after a certain period of inactivity. The main reason to turn on this option is to make sure you don’t block other people from modifying a shared collection that you have open if you leave AceText running and your computer doesn’t soon go to sleep when you leave it unattended.
The option to try to obtain write access when activating a read-only collection now makes read-only collections available as destinations for the Duplicate Clips and Move Clips commands. This way the “make collections read-only when deactivating them” option doesn’t get in your way when duplicating or moving clips between collections.
The button that corresponds with the Options|Visualize Line Breaks menu item was removed from the main toolbar. The drop-down menu of the Visualize Spaces button on the collection toolbar now has an additional copy of this menu item. This better groups the relates visualization commands.
See also: AceText 4.2.0 version history
Two options were added to the Appearance Preferences.
The checkbox labeled “Control+Wheel changes the font size instead of scrolling one page” lets you choose what happens when you rotate the mouse wheel while holding down the Control key with the mouse hovering over an edit control. If unchecked, the editor scrolls its contents up or down by as many lines as fit in the editor’s height. This lets you scroll rapidly through long clips. If checked, the editor increases or decreases its font size, effectively zooming its contents.
Turn on “show line numbers on physical lines only” to only show a line number on a line if the previous line ended with a line break. This way line numbers do not change when lines are broken up by Word Wrap. Turn it off to show line numbers for all lines. Use the Line Numbers item in the Options menu to toggle whether line numbers are shown at all.
Turning off the “show toolbars” option now only hides the main toolbar and the collection toolbar. It no longer hides the main menu or the Search toolbar. Turning the option back on again no longer positions the main menu incorrectly.
The Collection toolbar has many more buttons in AceText 4 than in AceText 3. We omitted the Delete Clip button to try to keep the number of buttons manageable. That button is now back by popular demand. But, if you use both the AceText Tower and the AceText Editor then the buttons for duplicating, moving, and deleting clips are now only available on the AceText Tower, above the clip tree. You’ll be using those buttons while selecting clips in the clip tree anyway. It leaves more space on the Collection toolbar on the AceText Editor for editing commands, even when the AceText editor is tucked into a corner to leave space for another application.
Pressing Ctrl+F to move keyboard focus to the Search box now selects the existing search term, as it did in AceText 3. This allows you to immediately replace the search term by entering a new search term.
Even when Automatic Capture is enabled, AceText cannot capture clips if the ClipHistory is locked with a password. AceText now flashes the Lock icon in the notification area when this happens, reminding you to unlock the collection. You can still turn off Automatic Capture to stop the icon from flashing.
When you tick the Parameters checkbox, AceText substitutes parameters in the form of %PARAM% when it send a clip to another application. A number of built-in parameters were added.
%CURWEEK% and %CLIPWEEK% insert the number of the week of the current year and of the clip’s year. If these are followed by %CURYEAR% or %CLIPYEAR% then those represent the year that the week started in. So if the clip’s date is January 1st, 2022, which was on a Saturday, then %CLIPWEEK%/%CLIPYEAR% is substituted with 52/2021. AceText follows the ISO 8601 standard which sees Monday as the first day of the week and up to the first 3 days of the week as part of the previous year if January 1st is on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.
%CURYMD% and %CLIPYMD% insert the current date and the clip’s date in YYYYMMDD format. This format allows a numeric sort to sort the dates correctly. Many existing placeholders for date and time parts have new counterparts with an extra Z. Those insert the number with a leading zero if it is less than 10. %CURDAY% inserts the day of the month as a number between 1 and 31. %CURDAYZ% inserts a number between 01 and 31.
When the Paramters checkbox is checked, AceText now interprets the double percentage sign %% as a single literal percentage sign. To make this clear it is highlighted with the same color as escaped literals in regular expressions. The color uses a gray background by default. A single literal % that is not part of a placeholder name is still treated as a literal % like before. It’s not highlighted as it doesn’t get any special treatment.
This change can cause some of your clips to paste differently now. In the past, pasting a clip containing %%CURYEAR%% would paste as %2022%, treating %CURYEAR% as a parameter and the single % signs before and after it as literals. Now it pastes as %CURYEAR%, treating the %% pairs as literal % signs, leaving CURYEAR as literal text in between. This is also the purpose of this change. You can easily include %PARAM% as literal text in a clip in which other parameters need to be substituted by including it as %%PARAM%%. In older versions of AceText you’d have to use something like %PCT%PARAM%PCT% and add a second clip to your collection with %PCT% as the label and a literal % as its contents so that %PCT% would be substituted with a literal % leaving PARAM as literal text. If you used this technique in the past then those clips will still be pasted the same way. %CURYEAR%%CURMONTHZ% will still be pasted as 202202. The clip is scanned from left to right for parameters. So %CURYEAR% is matched first. Its trailing % is then no longer available to be paired with the next %, so they aren’t seen as a literal %.
See also: AceText 4.1.0 version history
The URL field would sometimes overlap the Search toolbar in the AceText Editor. You could work around this by resizing AceText.
You can use Collection|Set Password to add a password to a collection. When a collection has a password you can use Collection|Lock Collection to lock it. This gives it a yellow tab in the AceText editor and shows a password field with an Unlock button when the collection is active. Previously this worked correctly for all collections except the ClipHistory. This has been fixed.
AceText collection files use an XML-based format. If you just use AceText to manage your collections then you don’t need to care about this. But the XML-based format makes it possible to manipulate the files with XML processing tools. In XML, the hours, minutes and seconds are supposed to be delimited with colons. But AceText was delimiting them with the time delimiter specified in the regional settings in Windows. This is in fact a colon for nearly all regions. But a few regions such as Scandinavia and South Asia use a dot. This caused AceText to write time values delimited with dots, which is invalid in XML. This does not cause any problems when you load the collection back into AceText. AceText accepts any single character delimiter in date and time values when it reads XML. So if you only use AceText to edit your collections then this bug does not affect you. But other XML processing tools may refuse to read AceText collection files. Now AceText always writes time values with colons so the XML is always perfectly valid.
If you resize AceText’s by dragging the top or bottom edge of its window (so you’re changing its height but not its width) while AceText is showing a “before & after” clip then the two edit controls for the “before” and “after” parts of the clip now adjust their height to share the available space between them.
The Generate Random Clip command in the Clip menu shows a dialog box that has a checkbox labeled Secret. If the active collection is protected with a password then you can tick that checkbox to make the generated clip a secret one. This lets you use AceText as a password manager. If the active collection is not protected with a password then the Secret checkbox is disabled. In previous releases the checkbox stayed disabled for the remainder of your AceText session. Now it is enabled again if you use Generate Random Clip on an password-protected collection.
You can search for a regular expression if you click the Search Options button and tick the “regular expression” option. If you enter a regex with a syntax error then AceText highlights the invalid part of the regex in red. If you try to search with it anyway then you get a popup message explaining the error. But a regex that is syntactically valid may still trigger an error while the regex engine tries to execute it due to infinite recursion, catastrophic backtracking, or an excessive number of group repetitions. AceText now pops up an error message for these execution errors too instead of treating them as failed match attempts. This makes the problem with the regex more obvious. It also stops AceText from continuing to try the faulty regex on other clips if you chose to search through all clips or all collections in the Search Options.
The Search toolbar has a Highlight All button that highlights all search matches in the clip parts that you have enabled in the Search Options. Doing so no longer triggers access violation errors when live spelling and URL highlighting are disabled. You can toggle live spelling with Options|Live Spell Check. You can toggle URL highlighting on the Appearance page in the Preferences.
See also: AceText 4.0.5 version history
This release could not be found (404).
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This release fixes another issue with parameter substitution. AceText 4 only does this for clips for which you tick the new Parameters checkbox. When you do AceText 4 highlights the parameters to show what will be substituted. Built-in parameters (which are substituted without prompting) are highlighted in blue. Custom parameters are highlighted in purple. Custom parameters are automatically substituted with the contents of another clip if there is one that has the parameter as its label. AceText prompts for the value for all other custom parameters. When AceText shows you the prompt it has already substituted the parameters that it could substitute automatically. If those substitutions contain percentage signs then this could result in other text after the substitution looking like another parameter in the form of %PARAM%. When that happened the parameters that AceText prompted for were not substituted correctly or at all. This has been fixed. Parameters are now substituted correctly when a clip has a mixture of parameters that are automatically substituted and parameters that are prompted for. The text that the automatic parameters are substituted with no longer affects and is no longer affected by the substitution of the parameters that require a prompt.
AceText 4 supports clips with syntax coloring that is automatically applied by a syntax coloring scheme. A variety of syntax coloring schemes for popular programming languages and file formats are included with AceText. You can download user-contributed syntax coloring schemes via the button on the Appearance page in the Preferences. AceText now correctly reloads the syntax coloring schemes immediately after you close the download window.
The Replace All button now works correctly on the Clipboard tab. The Convert|Characters|Characters ⇒ &htmlchar; menu item now does too. The Search Options button on the AceText Tower is now functional.
Pressing the AceType hotkey now selects the previously used abbreviation in the AceType lookup field like AceText 3 used to do. This way you can immediately enter a new abbreviation as it will replace the selected abbreviation. The AceType lookup field is a full-featured edit control. So you can move the cursor to edit the previously used abbreviation instead of entering a new one if you prefer.
The option “Pressing Tab inserts spaces instead of tab characters” on the Appearance page in the Preferences now remains in effect when restarting AceText 4, like it did in AceText 3. The behavior of the controls for entering key combinations for Copy and Paste commands on the Applications and Windows pages in the Preferences has been corrected. They now work like they used to do in AceText 3.
See also: AceText 4.0.4 version history
This release fixes two issues with parameter substitution. AceText 4 only does this for clips for which you tick the new Parameters checkbox. When you do AceText 4 highlights the parameters to show what will be substituted. Built-in parameters (which are substituted without prompting) are highlighted in blue. Custom parameters are highlighted in purple. Custom parameters are automatically substituted with the contents of another clip if there is one that has the parameter as its label. AceText prompts for the value for all other custom parameters. You can change the colors by customizing the palette in the Appearance Preferences. The parameter colors are at the bottom of the list of individual colors.
%CLIPHISTORY1% is a built-in parameter that is substituted with the first item in the ClipHistory (or with nothing if the ClipHistory is blank). %CLIPHISTORY2% is substituted with the second item in the ClipHistory. %CLIPHISTORY3% with the third, and so on. You can use numbers as high as you have items in the ClipHistory. Parameters with higher numbers are replaced with nothing. These are built-in parameters. They are now correctly highlighted in blue. Previously they were highlighted in purple.
In AceText 4.0.2 we made some internal optimizations to how AceText substitutes clips. Unfortunately, this introduced a new bug. Pasting a clip that uses both a built-in parameter and a custom parameter into another application resulted in an “invalid pointer operation” error. The error could occur immediately or when copying something else to the clipboard. This has been fixed.
AceText 4 has a new predefined configuration on the Applications page in the Preferences labeled (any other application). These settings are used when AceText needs to decide whether to show the clipboard’s contents on the Clipboard tab or automatically capture text into the ClipHistory when the clipboard is owned by a window and application that are not otherwise configured on the Applications or Windows page. Turning off the option to “allow the Clipboard tab to show text copied to the clipboard” disables the Clipboard tab for all applications and windows other than those for which you have explicitly. This was not possible in AceText 3. But due to a bug, doing this caused “list index out of bounds” errors when accessing the Clipboard tab if the clipboard was owned by an unconfigured window and application. This has been fixed. Now the Clipboard tab will indicate that it isn’t showing the clipboard’s contents because you turned off that option for (any other application).
AceText 4 supports clips with syntax coloring that is automatically applied by a syntax coloring scheme and clips with emphasis that you apply yourself. On the Applications and Windows pages in the Preferences there are options to paste this syntax coloring or emphasis as HTML or RTF into the target application or window. Now these options only affect pasting clips for which you selected a syntax coloring scheme or to which you applied emphasis. Clips without a scheme or emphasis are now always pasted as plain text.
The Export button on the Preferences dialog now closes the Preferences dialog after the settings have been exported. If you change any preferences before exporting then those changes are exported and are applied to AceText when the Preferences dialog closes.
AceText 4 has a new Operation menu. It contains the AcePaste Now and SequencePaste commands that didn’t have menu items (but did have toolbar buttons) in AceText 3. It also has several new commands for toggling the operation of the ClipHistory. The commands in the Operation menu all has keyboard shortcuts using F6. Some of those conflicted with the shortcuts for the Find First Clip, Find Next Clip, and Find Previous Clip commands. These commands have toolbar buttons at the bottom of the AceText Tower. But their keyboard shortcuts work regardless of whether the AceText Tower is visible. Those shortcuts have been combinations with F6 since AceText 1.0.0. The keyboard shortcuts of the items in the Operation menu have been changed to remove the conflict. The new ClipHistory toggles now use combinations with F7 that AceText didn’t use before. SequencePaste Up now uses Shift+F5 as it did in AceText 3 and prior. SequencePaste Down now uses Ctrl+F5. This is a change. AceText 3 used F5 for SequencePaste Down. In AceText 4, F5 is the shortcut for the new Insert Date & Time command in the Text menu. Microsoft Notepad also uses F5 to insert the date and time.
The Format|Quote Block command no longer inserts extraneous spaces at the start of each line.
See also: AceText 4.0.2 version history
In AceText 4 the ClipHistory toolbar has many new commands. The Automatic Capture toggle button replaces the checkbox that was in the Operation preferences. Auto Split does the opposite of Auto Append. Move to Top, Move to Bottom, and Reverse Clips let you rearrange the clips in the ClipHistory. All these commands are now also available in the right-click menu on the ClipHistory panel.
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. Toggling the theme also toggles the color palettes that you selected in the Appearance preferences if they have a light or dark companion palette. In version 4.0.0 the edit controls did not immediately use the color palette that was toggled to. This is now fixed.
The print preview for printing a collection now has a What to Print button that lets you select which kinds of clips and which parts of those clips should be included in the printout. AceText now remembers your choices. Future printouts will automatically use the same settings until you change them via the What to Print button.
The print preview has a Font & Layout button that lets you select a different text layout (which also determines the font) for printing. AceText 3 already had this. But AceText 4.0.0 broke it. Changing the text layout resulted in an overly large font. This has been fixed.
Live spelling, which you can toggle via the Options menu, also works on the edit control for clip labels and folder labels in AceText 4. But double-clicking a misspelled word in the label did not keep it selected when the spell check dialog appeared if selections were not persistent (which you can toggle in the Options menu too). If you clicked the Replace button on the spell checker or double-clicked a suggested replacement then the replacement would be inserted after the misspelled word instead of replacing the misspelled word. In AceText 4.0.1 the misspelled word will be replaced even when selections are not persistent.
AceText 4.0.1 is once again compatible with Windows XP SP3. AceText 4.0.0 would crash upon startup. Windows XP without SP3 is not supported.
AceText 4 is a major upgrade from previous versions. If you previously purchased a license to AceText, you can upgrade to AceText 4 at a significant discount.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
See also: AceText 4.0.0 version history
Pressing Enter on the keyboard while the clip tree has keyboard focus is a quick way to complete an AcePaste operation. Doing so no longer produces a beep.
You can drag and drop clips from one tab in AceText onto another to move or copy (holding down Ctrl) clips from one collection to another. This method also allows you to move or copy clips from a collection to the ClipHistory. The ClipHistory does not support “before and after” clips as that is not a clipboard format normally used by other applications and AceText does not automatically capture what AceText itself copies to the clipboard. When you drag and drop a “before and after” clip from a collection to the ClipHistory, AceText now converts the clip to a “plain text” clip to prevent any errors. The converted clip contains the joined text of the original clip.
When a collection contains parameters in the form of %PARAMETER%, AceText prompts for values to replace the parameters with when you send the clip to another application. AceText keeps a history of the values you provide for each parameter in each collection. This history is saved into the collection file. The collection file should contain only one history for each parameter, even if the parameter is used in multiple clips. But the XML schema for collection files does not enforce this.
If an AceText collection file did somehow end up with multiple histories for the same parameter, then previous versions of AceText were unable to open the collection. If the collection was locked with a password, AceText would pretend the password was incorrect even if you provided the correct password.
Now, AceText correctly reads collection files with multiple histories for the same parameter. It will merge them so that when saving your collection, there will be only one history per parameter as previous versions of AceText expect.
When you lock your workstation, AceText now automatically locks all password-protected collections that you have open.
The Move Clips and the Delete toolbar buttons are now correctly enabled or disabled when you switch to the Recycle Bin tab.
When you copy bytes to the clipboard in hexadecimal mode in EditPad Pro, AceText now correctly captures those bytes as a “binary data” clip into the ClipHistory.
This release fixes a couple of issues that affected AceText 3.6.0.
When you paste a clip into another application (using AcePaste or another method), AceText substitutes parameters in the form of %PARAMETER% before pasting the clip. If the collection contains another clip with %PARAMETER% as its label then this substitution happens automatically. This allows you to reuse the same text in multiple clips and have only one place in the collection where you would need to change it. In AceText 3.6.0, pasting a clip that contains a parameter that is the label of another clip failed with an access violation.
The clip tree shows you all the clips and folders in a collection. When the AceText Tower is disabled, the clip tree is docked to the AceText editor. In version 3.6.0, the clip tree could not be scrolled with the mouse wheel when docked. If you had more collection tabs than fit the width of the AceText Editor it would scroll the collection tabs instead. Otherwise, nothing would happen. This has been fixed so you can scroll the clip tree with the mouse wheel again. You can still scroll the collection tabs with the mouse wheel if you hover the mouse pointer over the tabs. (On Windows 8.1 and prior this only works if a control on the AceText Editor other than the multi-line text editor control has keyboard focus. On Windows 10 it works regardless of where keyboard focus is.) This ability was new in 3.6.0 and the reason scrolling the clip tree was broken.
AceText allows you to make collections read-only via the Collection menu or by right-clicking a collection’s tab and selecting Read Only. AceText also has several options on the Files page in the Preferences to automatically make collections read-only. Making a collection read-only prevents accidental changes and allows multiple people on your network to have the same AceText collection file open at the same time.
When the active collection is read-only, all commands that modify the active collection are disabled and the edit controls are made read-only. But previous versions of AceText did not disable drag-and-drop for read-only collections. You could remove clips from a read-only collection by dragging them to another collection. You could add clips to a read-only collection by dropping them onto it. And you could move clips within a read-only collection by dragging and dropping them within the collections clip tree.
This bug has been fixed. You can still drag clips from a read-only collection to another collection or to another application. But doing so now always makes a copy of those clips. The dragged clips are never removed from the read-only collection. You can no longer drop clips onto a read-only collection. While dragging a clip over a read-only collection the mouse pointer changes to a “forbidden” symbol indicating you can’t drop the clip on the read-only collection. If you try the drag-and-drop is canceled without moving or copying any clips. This does give the appearance that dragging a clip from a read-only collection is a forbidden operation. When you start dragging, the mouse pointer shows the “forbidden” symbol because you can’t drop the clip on the same read-only collection. But if you keep dragging and move the mouse pointer to the tab of another collection or to another application that accepts drag-and-drop then the mouse pointer will change to indicate that you can drop the clip onto the other collection or other application to make a copy.
If you modified a read-only collection via drag-and-drop in previous versions of AceText, then those changes were saved if you have “automatically save AceText Collections” enabled on the Files page in the Preferences. It is by default.
If you need some of your collections to be read-only then you should upgrade to AceText 3.6.0 immediately.
The Clip|Sort Collection menu item was correctly disabled for read-only collections in previous versions. But while disabled, it did not show the sort order of the collection. Now it does indicate the sort order for read-only collections, while still not allowing you to change the order while the collection is read-only.
See also: AceText 3.6.0 version history
With AceText you can follow RSS and Atom feeds. To do so, create a new collection or open an existing collection. Add a folder to the collection. Then select “RSS feed reader” in the “Kind” drop-down list. Paste the URL of your RSS or Atom feed in the URL field at the bottom. Then click the Refresh Now button. The entries in the RSS feed then appear as clips inside the folder. You can tick “automatically refresh feed” to have AceText automatically check the feed for new entries at regular intervals.
New in version 3.5.2 is that AceText now correctly handles RSS and Atom feeds that do not have an XML declaration. It can load feeds from HTTPS URLs if the OpenSSL library is available. If you have EditPad Pro, you can copy libaey32.dll and ssleay32.dll from EditPad Pro’s installation folder to AceText’s installation folder. Otherwise you can download a ZIP file with the two DLLs at http://indy.fulgan.com/SSL/. If AceText indicates “x64” next to its version number in the About box then you need the “win64.zip” file. Otherwise you need the “win32.zip” file. If the OpenSSL library is not available, AceText will say “Error downloading the feed: could not load the SSL library” below the Refresh Now button after you click it.
A couple of fixes were made to the All Collections tab. This tab shows all the clips in all the collections that you have open. Those clips are now shown in the same order on the All Collections tab as in their original collections. Switching from the All Collections tab to a collection tab no longer triggers the occasional “invalid class typecast” error.
Previous versions of AceText already scaled themselves quite well on high resolution displays. This release brings a few more tweaks to make AceText look even better. Most obviously, the tabs that hold your AceText collections are now better proportioned on high DPI systems.
AceText’s installer has been improved to better deal with Controlled Folder Access. This is the ransomware protection feature added to Windows Defender in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. It is unchanged in the April 2018 Update. AceText’s installation will now go a bit more smoothly when Controlled Folder Access is enabled. AceText’s installer now knows that when Windows Defender is not operational (because you’re using another anti-malware solution), Controlled Folder Access can’t be active and thus needn’t be dealt with. This avoids conflict between AceText’s installer and certain heavy-handed anti-malware solutions such as BitDefender.
The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update adds a new feature to Windows Defender called Controlled Folder Access. It is disabled by default. When enabled, it prevents applications from creating files and modifying files in folders commonly used to save personal data such as the Desktop and Documents folders. The goal is to block ransomware. In practice, it seems to block almost any application unless you specifically add it to the list applications allowed through Controlled Folder Access. Even applications like installers that run with Administrator privileges are blocked by it.
AceText’s installer has been improved to better deal with Controlled Folder Access. It now adds itself as an application allowed through Controlled Folder Access if that is needed to be able to create the desktop shortcut and install the sample collections into the Public Documents folder. During a regular installation, AceText’s installer adds AceText to the list of applications allowed through Controlled Folder Access, even when Controlled Folder Access is disabled. This way you won’t run into issues when you try to save collections in your Documents folder or on your desktop with AceText. The installer can’t do this when creating a portable install as then the installer doesn’t have the Administrator privileges needed to modify settings in Windows Defender.
The Fall Creators Update reserves several Windows+Control+letter key combinations for the operating system. So once again we have changed the default hotkeys for activating AceText while working with other applications. The new defaults are used when you install AceText for the first time on any version of Windows. When upgrading from a previous version of AceText, AceText will continue using the hotkeys used by the previous version, whether those were the old defaults or whether you customized the hotkeys. These are the new defaults:
The Hotkeys page in the Preferences now indicates which hotkeys, if any, could not be registered. You won’t be able to OK the Preferences dialog until you change or disable all hotkeys that are reserved by the operating system or registered as system-wide hotkeys by other applications.
AceText’s spell checker received some fixes and improvements to how it handles capitalization. If the dictionary contains a word in all lowercase, then AceText accepts any capitalization of the word as correctly spelled. This way any word can be capitalized at the start of sentences or in titles without having to duplicate all words in the dictionary. If the dictionary contains a word with at least one uppercase letter and does not contain the same word in all lowercase, then the spell checker requires the word to be capitalized in exactly the same way as it is in the dictionary. This way the spell checker can enforce capitalization of proper names, for example. AceText’s spell checker has always worked this way for words in the main dictionary.
What’s new is that these rules now also apply to words that you have told AceText to learn. Previously, AceText accepted any capitalization of all learned words. This change may cause AceText to flag words as misspelled that it previously didn’t. In particular, words that are all lowercase will now be flagged as misspelled if you had AceText learn the capitalized variant. To fix this, you can tell AceText to also learn the lowercase variant. Or you can click the Word List button in the spell checker panel to edit the list of learned words to remove unnecessary capitalization.
Learned replacements that only change the case of a word no longer (incorrectly) highlight occurrences of the word with the corrected case as misspelled. This fix, along with the improvement to make the user word list case sensitive, makes it possible to force your preferred capitalization of a word that is in all lowercase in the main dictionary. You can do this by clicking the Word List button on the spell checker panel and adding word=Word to the list of automatic replacements.
See also: AceText 3.5.0 version history
This release fixes two bugs. The ellipsis character (Unicode code point U+2026) was changed into a line break when AceText copied an entire clip to the clipboard and you pasted into an application that’s not from Just Great Software. Only this specific character was affected. The ellipsis character occupies position 0x85 in single byte Windows code pages, which caused AceText to mistake it for the next line control character (Unicode code point U+0085). AceText converts all line breaks into CRLF line breaks when you copy text to the clipboard as this is the only line break style that many Windows applications can handle.
The splitter bar on the AceText Tower moved a little upwards each time you shut down and restarted AceText, leaving a little less space for the list of collections (and equally more for the clip tree). Now it stays put when you shut down and restart AceText.
This release fixes a bug that had serious consequences under certain circumstances. Whenever you had AceText perform a search using a regular expression (regardless of whether you had it make replacements) and whenever you had AceText perform a search-and-replace across all clips (regardless of whether you used a regex), AceText would leak an amount of memory equal to the size of the clip being searched through. This meant that whenever you performed such searches, AceText’s memory usage would increase and that memory would not be available for reuse by AceText or other applications until you closed and restarted AceText.
AceText is primarily designed to work with very small snippets of text. So under normal usage, the amount of memory leaked was small enough that it didn’t cause any problems. That’s also why it had gone unnoticed until now. But if you had AceText do a large search-and-replace, such as replacing many thousands of regex matches in a clip that contains a few million characters, AceText could quickly exhaust your computer’s available memory. This would cause AceText to crash. It could also cause other applications to crash if they were starved for memory at the wrong time.
This bug has now been fixed. Any extra memory needed for searching is now immediately reused. Even a massive search-and-replace will only show a slight increase in memory usage. The undo history will use a small amount of memory to allow you to undo the search-and-replace. That memory is released when the collection is closed or the item falls off the undo history.
Replacing all matches in a single clip now adds only a single item to the undo history, just like replacing all matches in all clips already did. That one undo item undoes all replacements at once.
AceText now has an item for RegexMagic in its Search Options menu. You can open this menu via the Search Options button in the lower right corner of AceText’s window. Clicking the RegexMagic item launches RegexMagic if you have it installed. You can then use RegexMagic to prepare a regular expression for AceText. Click the Send button on the Regex panel in RegexMagic when you’re done.
The RegexBuddy item in the same menu now tells RegexBuddy to use the text of the active clip in AceText as the sample text on the Test panel in RegexBuddy.
The integration between AceText and RegexBuddy (and RegexMagic) now also works when you are using portable installs of AceText and RegexBuddy. For this to work the products either have to be installed in the same folder, or in a subfolder of the same folder. The subfolder has to be named “RegexBuddy4” or “RegexBuddy” for RegexBuddy and “RegexMagic2” or “RegexMagic” for RegexMagic.
AceText is now able to automatically check for updates and other news. You can also make it check on request by selecting Help|News and Updates in the menu. When AceText shows news or when the check on request tells you there is no news you can click the Settings button to choose which news items you want to see. By default, AceText automatically shows news and updates for itself and any of our products that you’ve used in the past 30 days. Though for DeployMaster, RegexBuddy, and RegexMagic, that will only start working once they gain the ability to automatically show news.
News settings and history are shared between all our products so you won’t see the same news more than once. Each product automatically shows at most one news item per day and at most one news item on request. So you don’t need to worry about ever being bombarded with news if you haven’t used our software for a while. You won’t see the news item announcing AceText 3.4.0 either because that is considered to be old news already when you’ve upgraded to AceText 3.4.0.
This release fixes one bug. Editing a clip’s label with the shift key held down (to enter capital letters) triggered a harmless but annoying access violation error if the folder or collection containing the clip was sorted by clip labels and the edit changed the position of the clip.
Windows 10 changes the way the mouse wheel works in Windows. In older versions of Windows, the wheel scrolled the window that had keyboard focus, regardless of the position of the mouse pointer. In Windows 10, the wheel scrolls the window under the mouse pointer. AceText now correctly implements the Windows 10 mouse wheel behavior when running on Windows 10. The mouse wheel behavior in AceText is unchanged when running on an older version of Windows.
AceText now scales itself better on systems using 200% or more display scaling. On such systems, toolbar icons are doubled in size. This makes the small icons suitable for 200% display scaling and the large ones for 300% scaling. You can switch between small and large icons on the Appearance page in the Preferences. The about box and demo messages now double or triple their size on systems using 200% or 300% display scaling. These changes mean that AceText is now perfectly usable on all displays available on the market today, including laptops with 4K screens.
The clip tree font and colors that you can specify on the Appearance page in the Preferences are now also used for the list of collections in the AceText Tower and for the list of clips in the ClipHistory.
The spell checker now saves its list of learned words much faster. This removes any delay when changing the spell check language or when switching to another application after learning a new word. Previously, this delay could be quite long if thousands of words had already been learned. In addition, learned words with characters that are not supported by the system code page are now saved correctly.
AceText now waits for all modifier keys on the keyboard to be released before sending clips to other applications. This avoids the possibility of releasing those keys while AceText is simulating its keystrokes. It makes sending clips to other applications more reliable.
This release fixes two bugs. One bug was introduced in AceText 3.2.1. In the ClipHistory, filtering clips showed clips that do not match the filter instead of those that do match the filter.
The other fix was an older bug. Searching and replacing by pressing the Ctrl+Alt+F3 keyboard shortcut while the AceText Tower had keyboard focus caused AceText to get stuck in an infinite loop. Now this will activate the AceText Editor if it is visible and correctly perform the search-and-replace. It will do nothing if the AceText Editor is not visible.
This release fixes one bug that was introduced in AceText 3.2.1. A clean install of AceText 3.2.1 incorrectly initialized its default preferences. This caused errors when opening the Preferences dialog and when trying to OK the Preferences dialog.
If you have encountered this, uninstall AceText 3.2.1. This will remove AceText’s preferences. Then install AceText 3.2.2. Now AceText will start with the default preferences. You can change them via the Preferences dialog. Any collections you saved will not be automatically reopened. But the collection files will still be where you saved them. So use the Collection|Open Collection menu item to reopen them.
If you did not encounter this, install AceText 3.2.2 without uninstalling your previous version of AceText. That way your preferences and file history are preserved after the update.
This release further improves AceText’s compatibility with Windows 10. The default AceType hotkey is now Windows+Control+T. The previous default Windows+A no longer works on Windows 10 as it is reserved by the operating system to open the Action Center. You can configure AceText’s system-wide hotkeys on the Hotkeys tab in the Preferences.
When we improved AceText’s handling of Windows 10’s transparent window borders we introduced a new bug. On Windows 10, closing AceText 3.2.0 when it is not maximized and with the left or top edge of the window touching the left or top edge of the desktop caused it to start up slightly wider or taller next time. AceText 3.2.1 fixes this while retaining improvements made in 3.2.0.
This release also fixes one important bug. On the Applications and Windows tabs in the Preferences, you can configure AceText to give special treatment to certain applications or windows. This includes an option to simulate copy and paste commands to make the application or window send text to AceText or receive text from AceText. If you enable this, you need to specify the keyboard shortcuts that AceText should use to simulate the copy and paste commands. If these keyboard shortcuts included the Ctrl or Alt key as part of the final key combination (or only key combination, as in Ctrl+V), then AceText did not properly release the Ctrl or Alt key when sending the key combinations to simulate the copy or paste command. This would cause the Ctrl or Alt key to remain virtually depressed until you pressed and released the actual Ctrl or Alt key on your keyboard.
AceText also simulates Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V keystrokes to transfer text from and to applications and windows that are not configured in the Preferences. These were not affected by the bug.
See also: AceText 3.2.1 version history
This release brings improved compatibility with Windows 10. Windows 10 now allows Windows Store applications (previously known as Modern UI or Metro applications) to run on the desktop. This makes it possible to use AceText with such applications. The best know example of such an application is Microsoft’s new Edge browser. Sending clips directly to such applications (through AcePaste, for example) was unreliable with previous versions of AceText. Sometimes the pasted text would appear in the target application. Sometimes it would not. We’ve now tweaked AceText’s method for sending clips directly to applications to make it just as reliable for Windows Store applications as it already was for Windows desktop applications.
On Windows 10, window borders appear to be very thin. But the area where you can grab the window border with the mouse to resize the window extends quite a bit beyond the visible part of the border. Technically, this entire area is part of the border and thus part of the window. This complicates things for applications like AceText that preserve window size and position while ensuring the entire window is visible when you restart them. Previously, AceText would make sure its entire window including the entire border is visible when you restart it. On Windows 10 the window would appear to be shifted away from the edge of your monitor if you had previously positioned it against the edge or even beyond the edge of your monitor. Now, AceText only requires the visible part of the border to be on-screen. If you shut down AceText with its window partially off-screen and restart it, then AceText now places its window so that the visible part of the window border touches the edge of the screen.
When deleting clips, AceText now maintains the scrolling position of the clip tree. This makes it easier to keep track of what’s happening. The URL button on the Appearance page in the Preferences now changes the color of highlighted email addresses in addition to changing the color of highlighted URLs.
On the Files tab in the Preferences, you can configure the locations of the ClipHistory and the Recycle Bin. As of version 3.1.3 AceText reverts these to their defaults if the locations become invalid. As of version 3.1.5 AceText warns you before reverting these if the reason is that the drive is not available, giving you a chance to connect the missing drive.
This uncovered a bug that was introduced in version 3.1.3. Portable installs of versions 3.1.3 through 3.1.5 did not correctly load the locations of the ClipHistory and the Recycle Bin. AceText 3.1.3 and 3.1.4 would silently revert these to their default locations, so you wouldn’t have noticed this problem when using the default locations. But AceText 3.1.5 would give a false warning about the drive being unavailable. Version 3.1.6 now correctly loads the ClipHistory and Recycle Bin locations, eliminating the false warning.
On the Files tab in the Preferences, you can configure the locations of the ClipHistory and the Recycle Bin. You can also choose whether AceText should automatically reopen the collections you had open last time. If any of these files are stored on a drive that is not available, AceText now tells you that, giving you the opportunity to connect the drive so that the files can be opened.
This release also fixes a bunch of minor bugs. The version history has the complete list.
This release brings minor fixes and improvements. AceText has long supported file:// URLs in the body text of clips, allowing you to reference external files from your AceText collections. Now, file:// URLs that do not specify a drive are taken as relative to the folder containing the AceText collection file. This makes it possible for clips to link to files irrespective of where your files and collections are stored, as long as each AceText collection is stored in the same folder as the files it references, or a parent folder thereof.
On the Files tab in the Preferences, there are a number of options to automatically make collections read-only. You may want to turn some of these on if other people on your network keep the same AceText collections open, as only one person can have write access at any given time to prevent people from overwriting each other’s changes. You may also want to turn these on if you use file synchronization software to synchronize your AceText collections between multiple PCs, as the synchronization software won’t be able to overwrite your AceText collections while AceText has them open with write access. New in this release is that the option “try to obtain write access when activating a read-only collection” now also takes effect when switching to AceText from another application, in addition to when switching collections within AceText.
The Help|Share Collections menu item allows you to share clip collections with other AceText and EditPad users. This feature has been broken for some time due to a combination of problems on the server that manages the shared clip collections and a bug in AceText itself. The issues on the server have been fixed, allowing all versions of AceText to download shared collections once again. If you want to upload a collection of your own, you should upgrade to ACeText 3.1.4 first as previous releases don’t always do the upload correctly.
The Whole Words Only search option now works correctly when not using regular expressions. The Forum window no longer opens minimized when AceText is configured to start minimized when Windows starts. The Forum window now also has full right-click menus.
When you press the AceEdit hotkey (Win+Ctrl+X by default), AceText sends a Copy command to the active application and then brings itself to front showing the Clipboard tab. This enables you to use AceText to edit the text you selected in the other application. In previous versions of AceText, you had to press the AceEdit hotkey again after editing the text to paste the modified text back into the active application. Now, AceText will automatically paste back the modified text when you switch back to that application, such as by clicking on it. Explicitly pressing the AceEdit hotkey still works.
If you have configured an application or window to receive clips as simulated keystrokes, and you send a clip that contains tab characters to that application, then AceText now simulates Tab key presses instead of simulating tab characters. The difference is that if the active control in the target application does not accept tabs then the Tab key presses will move keyboard focus to the next control. This way, if your application has a form with multiple edit boxes that you can navigate between using tabs, you can directly paste text into all of the edit boxes by preparing a single clip that has the text for all the edit boxes delimited with tabs.
If the same clip is selected on the tab of the collection that contains it as well as on the All Collections tab, then any changes you make to the clip on either tab are now correctly displayed when you switch to the other tab.
The Edit|Copy Clip to Clipboard command copies the entire clip to the clipboard. If multiple clips are selected in the tree, all of them are copied. New is that if a folder is selected, the entire folder along with everything it contains is copied to the clipboard. Previously, Edit|Copy Clip to Clipboard was disabled when a folder was selected.
The Text|Cut Text and Text|Copy Text commands cut or copy the text you have selected in the active clip. If no text is selected, they cut or copy the line that the cursor is on. This was broken in AceText 3.1.2. Cut and copy did nothing when no text was selected.
In the Files Preferences, you can specify the files in which AceText should save the ClipHistory and Recycle Bin (or that you don’t want them to be saved). Previously, if these file paths pointed to drives that don’t exist, AceText would start up with a blank ClipHistory and Recycle Bin and not save them and not show an error until you tried to close AceText. At that point you’d be told the paths are invalid. Now, if the drives don’t exist, AceText reverts these files to their default locations in your My Documents folder. If the files exist there, they will be loaded. If not, they will be created automatically.
See also: AceText 3.1.3 version history
When you press the AceEdit hotkey (Win+Ctrl+X by default), AceText sends a Copy command to the active application and then brings itself to front showing the Clipboard tab. This enables you to use AceText to edit the text you selected in the other application. In previous versions of AceText this didn’t work with certain applications such as Firefox. AceText would send the Copy command and pop up, but the other application wouldn’t copy the selection to the clipboard. AceText now pauses briefly between sending the Copy command and popping up, giving Firefox and other applications more time to copy the selection to the clipboard.
Several fixes were made to the search options which you can set by clicking the button in the bottom right corner of AceText’s window. The Regular Expression option now works on the Clipboard tab too. The Loop Automatically and All Clips in All Collections options now work together correctly.
The best way to get technical support for AceText is via its built-in forum. You can access it by selecting Help|Forum in the menu in AceText. Previously, AceText could connect to the Internet (and to the forum) if your PC had a direct internet connection or if it could connect through an HTTP proxy that either required no authentication or allowed basic authentication. You can configure the proxy server via the Proxy button on the login screen to the forum. Now AceText supports additional authentication methods for HTTP proxies. It will automatically negotiate a supported authentication method with the proxy server, so there’s no need to select the authentication method when you configure your HTTP proxy in AceText. AceText can now also connect to the Internet via proxy servers using versions 4, 4A, or 5 of the SOCKS protocol. You’ll need to select the correct version when configuring your SOCKS proxy in AceText. If your SOCKS proxy needs a password, then it will be running SOCKS version 5.
See also: AceText 3.1.2 version history
AceText 3.1.1 fixes some issues that we missed in last week’s AceText 3.1.0. AceText 3.1.0 uses a new method for sending Paste commands to other applications that is far more reliable than what previous versions of AceText used. Unfortunately, the new method did not work correctly if the active keyboard layout includes the AltGr key, casing the letter v to appear in the target application instead of a Paste command being sent. AceText 3.1.1 now takes into account that keyboards with an AltGr key handle the right hand Alt key differently.
The uninstaller is placed into AceText’s folder instead of the Windows folder starting with AceText 3.1.0. Upgrading from a previous version of AceText to AceText 3.1.0 deleted the uninstaller from the Windows folder, even when other applications still need it. The installer for AceText 3.1.1 will only do so if no other applications still need it. To uninstall other applications, copy the uninstaller from AceText’s folder into the Windows folder.
Switching to the Clipboard tab caused a harmless but annoying access violation error if the Search box was not blank. Turning on “open collections in read-only mode” on the Files tab in the Preferences made it impossible to turn off read-only mode, making all collections permanently read-only until this option was turned off.
See also: AceText 3.1.1 version history
Just as AceText 3.1.1 fixes issues we missed in last week’s AceText 3.1.0, AceText 2.3.1 fixes two of the same issues we missed in AceText 2.3.0. Namely, sending Paste commands to other applications now works correctly when the active keyboard layout includes the AltGr key. The installer will no longer remove the uninstaller from the Windows folder if it is still needed by other applications. The other issues that AceText 3.1.1 fixes did not occur in AceText 2.3.0.
See also: AceText 2.3.1 version history
AceText is now fully compatible with the Windows 8 desktop. Because Windows 8 reserves nearly all Windows+letter key combinations for the operating system, we have changed the default hotkeys for activating AceText while working with other applications. The new defaults are used when you install AceText for the first time on any version of Windows. When upgrading from a previous version of AceText, AceText will continue using the hotkeys used by the previous version, whether those were the old defaults or whether you customized the hotkeys. These are the new defaults:
When you paste a clip directly from AceText into another application, AceText either copies the text to the clipboard and then simulates a key combination such as Ctrl+V to make the target application paste the text, or AceText simulates keystrokes to type the text directly into the target application. AceText now uses a completely new method to simulate the keystrokes for sending Paste commands and for typing text. The new method is 100% reliable with all applications. Keystrokes are sent immediately rather than after you’ve released any modifier keys. If you keep a modifier key depressed (e.g. when using Ctrl+Enter or the AcePaste hotkey to send a clip), you’ll have to release and repress it for it to take effect again. The configuration options in the Applications Preferences and Windows Preferences have not changed. But you may want to review the choices you made there in the past, as both methods will now be much more reliable with all applications.
In AceText 3.0.0 we improved AceText by making it use the title of the web page as the clip’s label when you copy text in a web browser, instead of giving the clip no label which causes the start of the clip’s text to be shown in the clip tree. If you copy multiple bits of text from the same web page, all those clips will all have the same label. Some applications also copy text as HTML to the clipboard and always give the HTML the same title. AceText 3.0.x would give the same label to all clips captured from those applications, which is not very useful. To avoid this, AceText 3.1.0 will only use the page title as the clip’s label if the HTML also includes a source URL, which makes AceText capture a web snippet. Applications that always give the HTML the same label tend not to use source URLs, but web browsers always do. If you never want AceText to use the web page title as the clip’s label, you can now disable this in the Operation Preferences.
Several bugs were fixed. In the Appearance Preferences,changing the “text” color had no effect, resulting in black text on top of whichever background color you specified. Regardless of your color choice, selecting a monospaced layout resulted in blank or black editor controls with no visible text or only one line of visible text. The Text|Save Text command now uses the encoding you select in the dialog box.
See also: AceText 3.1.0 version history
Normally, when we release a major upgrade (AceText 3), we halt development of the previous version (AceText 2). Typically, there aren’t any significant bugs left to fix in the previous version, and new features and improvements go into the new version. But the new method of sending keystrokes to other applications makes AceText 3.1.0 so much more reliable that we’ve decided to backport this feature to AceText 2. If you still have a computer running Windows 98, ME, NT4, or 2000, you can upgrade these to AceText 2.3.0 and get the same reliability as AceText 3.1.0 (which requires Windows XP, Vista, 7, or 8).
The installer for AceText 2.3.0 will refuse to run on all 64-bit versions of Windows and all versions of Windows 8 and later. If you try it will tell you to upgrade to AceText 3, which is fully compatible with Windows 8 and comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions (bundled in a single installer). Since AceText 3 is a free upgrade for all AceText 2 users, and AceText 2 and 3 use the exact same file format (meaning files are fully compatible between the two), there is no reason to continue using AceText 2 on versions of Windows that it never officially supported.
See also: AceText 2.3.0 version history
When you click the X button to close AceText, it doesn’t shut down completely. It keeps running in the background so that text you copy to the clipboard can be captured into the ClipHistory, and the AcePaste and AceType hotkeys continue to work. Version 3.0.0 failed to hide the AceText taskbar button in certain situations when you clicked the X button.
The Find First, Find Next, and Find Previous buttons on the Clipboard tab now scroll the text as necessary when finding a search match. Previously the Clipboard tab would find all search matches, but failed to scroll the text, making it look as if nothing was found if the part of the text that the match was found in was scrolled out of view.
If you select a conversation or message in AceText’s built-in user forum and press Ctrl+C, an URL pointing to that conversation or message is copied to the clipboard. If you paste that link into a message on the forum, it will now be highlighted as a link. Double-clicking the link will activate the message. The discussion links at the bottom of each help file topic now also open AceText’s forum.
AceText uses a .chm file to provide context-sensitive help. This is the standard help system for modern Windows applications. Due to a bug in Internet Explorer 9, if a 64-bit application requests context-sensitive help using a .chm file, and you click on a link in that help file, the calling application will crash. To work around this, we’ve disabled context-sensitive help in the 64-bit version of AceText if you have Internet Explorer 9 installed on your PC. Pressing F1 will still open the help file, but it will show the first page in the help file, rather than the page that describes the part of AceText you’re using.
See also: AceText 3.0.1 version history
The big new features in this major upgrade are full Unicode support, including right-to-left scripts, and full support for 64-bit Windows.
AceText 2 was already capable of storing text in any language supported by Windows in AceText collections, but was not a full Unicode application. AceText 3 is a full Unicode application. You can use any language or script supported by Windows anywhere in AceText. AceText now supports bidirectional editing, so you can edit text written in right-to-left scripts such as Arabic or Hebrew or text written in a mixture of left-to-right and right-to-left scripts. You can configure text direction, cursor movement, fonts, and character spacing as part of the new text layout configuration system. You can have separate text layout configurations for left-to-right text clips, right-to-left text clips, and binary clips. The Right-to-Left item in the Options menu toggles between left-to-right and right-to-left text. If you have a keyboard layout for any right-to-left language installed, then pressing Ctrl and Shift on the keyboard also toggles between left-to-right and right-to-left.
The installer for AceText 3 automatically detects whether you’re running a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows, and installs the 32-bit or 64-bit version of AceText 3 accordingly. The benefit of the native 64-bit version of AceText is that you can now configure 64-bit applications on the Applications tab in the Preferences.
The installer for the purchased version of AceText now allows you to create portable installations even when you don’t have administrator rights on the PC you’re running the installer on. You can create a portable install in any folder that you can write to, even if that folder is on a hard drive. By default, the portable install will be 32-bit or 64-bit to match the Windows edition you’re running the installer on. You can pass the /32 command line parameter to the installer to force it to create a 32-bit portable install when running the installer on 64-bit Windows.
AceText’s handling of read-only collections and password-protected collections was improved. On the Operation tab in the Preferences, you now have several options for automatically making collections read-only when you stop using them, and automatically try to gain write access when you start using them. Using these options allows smoother collaboration when several people share the same AceText collections via the Windows network. There’s also a new option to automatically lock collections that you unlocked with a password after a certain period of inactivity. You can manually lock collections without closing them by using the new Lock Collection command in the Collection menu.
If you turn off the option to automatically save collections on the Operation tab in the Preferences, then the tabs of collections with unsaved changes are now highlighted in red. In AceText 2 such tabs were not highlighted at all. Tabs of collections that are locked with a password are now highlighted in yellow instead of red. Read-only collections are still highlighted in green. The tab colors can now be configured in the Preferences.
Because of the new Unicode and 64-bit support, AceText 3 requires Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7. Windows Server 2003 and 2008 are also supported. This is the main reason why AceText 3 is numbered as a major upgrade. We will continue to make AceText 2.2.4 available for download for those still running Windows 98, ME, NT4, or 2000. There is no change to the .atc file format used by AceText. So AceText 2 and 3 can open and save the same collection files.
But the number of new features in AceText 3 is closer to what you’d expect of a free minor upgrade from Just Great Software. That’s why AceText 3 is a free upgrade for all AceText 2 users. Simply download and install it as you would any free minor upgrade. AceText 3 will replace any previous version of AceText you may have installed on your computer.
See also: AceText 3.0.0 version history