Comments on: Counting words in Emacs

By: Rudolf Olah

Rudolf Olah — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:25:42 +0000

I’m sick and tired of using “wc” and I can’t even use it when I’m using Emacs in Windows, so I wrote up a one-liner that uses the how-many function: http://www.neverfriday.com/sweetfriday/2008/06/emacs-tip-word-counting-with-a.html

By: quaid

quaid — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:17:31 +0000

Thanks lazyweb (in the form of Peter), I’ll try that.

Good point, Anthony, I didn’t think to check actual authorship. It’s not very obvious, as it is not on the front page; in fact, the Thank You page seems to be the first instance of the author’s name. Perhaps he didn’t include an … in the source.

This raises an interesting point about writing technical content. I assumed the work was by the person with the nearest name, that is, the name of the website. Why? Because it is written in an informal, first person plural (we) style. I feel my reaction is natural — it’s speaking to “me” about “we” from DJ’s site.

Anyway, thanks for the correction.

By: Anthony Green

Anthony Green — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 16:14:57 +0000

I don’t think DJ wrote this. He just hosts free documentation on his web site. The author appears to be Robert J. Chassell.

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 09:27:55 +0000

Or you could do it the easy way:

(defun word-count nil "Count words in buffer" (interactive) (shell-command-on-region (point-min) (point-max) "wc -w"))