Add a word count to TextEdit with NanoCount

I'll second fishpatrol's TextWrangler recommendation. (You were recommending it, weren't you?) I've used it for a goodly while and I really dig it. I can get the word count (character count, too) with a single mouse click. Did I mention it's FREE? No? OK. It's FREE. (http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/index.shtml) Free software, yum yum!

To all fellow lower-MHz powerbook owners, my 667 MHz tibook whispers in your ears -- Firefox 1.5 (beta 2 currently, optimized is best) and VoodooPad. Those two programs cover an awful lot of my bases, and they speed along so fast that I don't even notice the aging state of my powerbook. Deer Park 1.5 seems to have a lot of issues initiating downloads, but it plays so much nicer with my CPU in all other respects than version 1.0 Firefox (or Camino or Safari) that I can definitely put up with the download issues. I do all my writing in VoodooPad these days, and I have a service for word counting that fits the bill. I don't think it's the same as the one above... The service is called "Statistics" and I have no idea where I got it originally. I can barely imagine living in a world where I would have to go through the Finder to get from one of my documents to another anymore. The Finder is one of those things which is NOT fast on my tibook.

And in the context of NaNoWriMo, word count is...well almost everything. Though I would find it extremely distracting to have a word count or progress bar constantly on screen (whispering "you suck," "you'll never get done"). Maybe others will find it motivating. I'm sure I'll be staring plenty at that wordcount. (It's Textwrangler for me.)

Actually almost any professional writing assignment is going to have a word length, not a column length - as the writer has no idea how the piece will be laid out before it's submitted, how could they possibly conform to a column measurement?

I think the real question to #3 was: why does anyone need to count words in a document? I remember having to write word-count-based essays way back in early grade school, but I doubt this tool is targeted to 5th graders. A better metric might be "length" measured in printed inches/mm.

#3: All the time. I'd much rather write in TextEdit than some overblown text editor. In fact I have written 26,823 words of my next novel in it right now. But I don't use Nanocount, I use CharCounter: http://www.softyards.com/charcounter.shtml . It installs as a Service so you can use it in anything, not just TextEdit, and it will count an entire document, or just a selection.

Okay, I'll bite: why would anybody care often enough about how many words they've written that they would get a plugin for TextEdit (which is an awesome text editor, I must say) that counts your words for you?

my 41 month old 667mhz powerbook g4 titanium chugs along quite nicely. after 3 years, its amazing how it's still very very usable. never had a problem with microsoft word or any other apps being slow (except for maybe iphoto) and i can even watch the 480p "HD" movie trailers from apple with a decent frame rate!

Oh, c'mon, Victor, you making Monty angry - please don't make him pop another hard drive, please? He's just a lowly little 400mhz G3, but he gets the job done. So what if he takes a little more time to open some apps up? Once they open, I'm good to go. And besides, you did a posting not long ago about how you wanted a tube amp for your iPod. Don't forget tube amps need 10 to 15 seconds to warm up. Patience, my son. Patience. But NanoCount does look like a sweet little app. I'm a wanna be writer and the word count goal would come in handy for me because I'm a little bit wordy. Have you noticed that? yeah, I'm wordy...