AceText Helper
June 14th, 2008An Autohotkey script I wrote to enhance the clip-collecting abilities of AceText.
I see a lot of information every day, and my brain is full of holes. So it’s not always easy to find your way back to a statement or reference on the web or in a document.
I wanted a quick and unobtrusive way of quickly referencing snippets of information I ran across, from any source, so that I can compile these in Acetext for later searching. Acetext offers Regular Expressions (Regexp), a powerful way to filter information using text patterns. It is a fantatstic research tool, but is a real workflow-killer when collecting web clips - you must use the mouse a lot.
So I reduced these actions to keyboard combinations and have all the hard work of clip collection done for me. In a geekish moment, I calculated the number of key-presses required for standard actions in Acetext and Notepad. My script reduces required key presses by half in most cases. When working with a lot of text this dramatically increases effciency and organisation 
Added to this, with Acetext I can literally drop selected clips into any number of XML feeds. Essentially I am creating a stream of information from what I come across throughout the day. These feeds can be accesses using a special reader, or published via a web-page script.
One such feed is hosted on this site, which auto-updates with a random subset of my daily clippings.
I’ve also added a ‘Thought - Tagger’ , a super-quick way to jot a few lines of text, telephone number, to-do, etc. without having to leave the keyboard.
AceText Helper (click to inspect, right-click to download)
Instructions included in the file. I hope somebody else finds it useful.
