Comments on: Counting words in Emacs

By: Bite Sized Emacs « Design, Development, and Consulting

Bite Sized Emacs « Design, Development, and Consulting — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:48:12 +0000

[...] to Karsten Wade and the discussion on this page. There are many word count alternatives in the Emacs Wiki, and there's also a word-count-mode that [...]

By: Foo

Foo — Fri, 08 May 2009 10:47:47 +0000

This has also been covered on the Emacs Wiki: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WordCount

By: Klaes

Klaes — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:25:41 +0000

Or, if you wanna make it really easy, just go to the start of the region you want to count, then C-space (then move to end of region) M-| Enter (then type) wc -w Enter
and it tells you.

By: terry

terry — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:25:35 +0000

i know its wrong but
(length ‘( your document in here ))
then C-x C-e

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"))