Tracking the words you write with WordCounter

How many words do you write every day? Think about it. Every time you send an email, post in Slack, or comment on an Instagram post. Oh, you thought I would mention those wondrous words you pour into your latest novel, blog post, marketing copy, or script?

On a good day, those more creative works are where I’d like most of my words to end up, but in reality, it’s probably the former category on average most of the time.

Over drinks with fellow writers last year, we started wondering how many words we wrote and where, and that might be an interesting programming experiment to create such a tool.

Video version

Then, I came across WordCounter quite by chance, which saved me the bother. As a technical experiment, I was still interested in how I might create my own. A short email conversation with WordCounter’s developer quickly told me that creating system-wide textfield observers (on macOS, anyway) was challenging.

The Installation and setup of WordCounter simple, but you need to give the application accessibility permissions and let it run at login and in the background for maximum usefulness.