Word count

[DuckDuckWhale]

In Vim, g<C-g> would show Col 8 of 274; Line 3 of 3; Word 6 of 52; Byte 35 of 302 in the bottom left corner. It would be nice if helix also has some functionality to count words.

[swork1]

In Vim, g<C-g> would show Col 8 of 274; Line 3 of 3; Word 6 of 52; Byte 35 of 302 in the bottom left corner. It would be nice if helix also has some functionality to count words.

What about implementing this as an editor.statusline element. Such as word-count, allowing a user to add this to their config.toml file?

[archseer]

We already have line/col information, but word count isn't as cheap to compute during editing since we'd need to rescan each time a change is made.

[DuckDuckWhale]

Would it be possible to track the delta in word count every time an edit is made? Something like if the edit introduces more whitespace sections, increase the word count by that number, and decrease it if it removes whitespace sections? I realize that it would be non-trivial to implement and therefore might not be the best way, but it might be theoretically possible without being too expensive to compute.

[codeswish]

We already have line/col information, but word count isn't as cheap to compute during editing since we'd need to rescan each time a change is made.

The g<C-g> command only provides the information based on the cursor's position when it is invoked. It is not continuously updated while editing. Wouldn't this mean a scan would only need to occur when the command is given?

[thairanaru]

I also agree that having builtin feature would be nice.
For a workaround, I have a marco shortcut which pipes a selection into a script that uses wc -w and notify-send to show a notification listing the word count. I hope this helps for people finding this thread.

[yashvesikar]

Thanks for the idea! I ended up binding it through a custom command in my config.toml:

[keys.normal.space]

# Custom command for word count
A-w = "@<A-|>tee /tmp/helix-wc.file<ret>:sh cat /tmp/test.file | wc -w<ret>"

source

[BlameTroi]

Thanks for the idea! I ended up binding it through a custom command in my config.toml:

[keys.normal.space]

# Custom command for word count
A-w = "@<A-|>tee /tmp/helix-wc.file<ret>:sh cat /tmp/test.file | wc -w<ret>"

Minor typo here, correcting in case someone else just yanks the code without looking at it too closely first.

[keys.normal.space]
# Custom command for word count of selection.
A-w = "@<A-|>tee /tmp/helix-wc.file<ret>:sh cat /tmp/helix-wc.file | wc -w<ret>"