Word Count in TextEdit

By Mohammad Aldalain, 23 November, 2015

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi AppleVis Community,
I do a lot of writing and reading and word count is very important to me. TextEdit does not show the word count, and the feature on Pages is available yet it does seem to me very confusing if compared to TextEdit.
So here's a script for TextEdit to show the word count. The only thing to do is to copy the script and paste it in /Library/Scripts.
Before you can have the word count shown in TextEdit, you'll need to enable showing Apple Script icon in the Extras Menu. So open Applications with CMD+Shift+A and then navigate to Utilities and Script Editor. Open preferences and check the options that says "Show Script menu in menu bar'.
That's it.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ccl8euizsymuf9/Word%20Count.scpt?dl=0

Options

Comments

By Thomas Byskov … on Sunday, November 29, 2015 - 18:25

Hi!

Thank you so much. It works like a charm here. I have a few suggestions though

Can you make som more info like characters without or with spaces? That is very needed for students who are working on essays that needs to be in a certain length like 2600 characters all inclusive spaces = one page of text.
I really like the script as it is now even then I have to open the script editor to run it every time I want the info, but I can easily adapt to this workaround.

Best regards Thomas

By Justin on Sunday, November 29, 2015 - 18:25

Hi,
I've got an app called word counter, don't remember where I found it. It counts all words, words with and without spaces, etc. I used it when writing research papers in college and it worked wonderfully! Just try typing word counter for mac or something like that and see what comes up in google.

By jrjolley (not verified) on Sunday, November 29, 2015 - 18:25

In reply to by Justin

I also have this, integrates with any editor and monitors files. Apart from Scrivener for my main writing, I use WC when in other apps, especially Marked 2.5 for writing multi-markdown text.

By KE7ZUM on Sunday, November 29, 2015 - 18:25

Yep, the syntax in the terminal is wc -w filename. I use this and used it for my guides on osx as I wanted to stay below a thousand words for my eGuide for each chapter. Just so it woudl be a bit of a shorter read. Not easy, but done. Lol!

Take care.

By jrjolley (not verified) on Sunday, November 29, 2015 - 18:25

In reply to by KE7ZUM

I personally would have just used Scrivener and set word targets but each to their own I suppose. That way, you're writing in one application instead of messing about.