I don’t know if anyone else has been wondering why Apple left a word count feature out of TextEdit but I certainly have been. Granted I have a couple word processors that are chock full of cool features including a word count but sometimes I like to use TextEdit because it is lightweight, simple and fast.

Anyway, I asked Google about a word count feature for TextEdit and one of the results was this easy Applescript option that works pretty well even if it involves running the script as a separate item to TextEdit. To run this you need to open the Script Editor in the /Applications/AppleScript/ folder:

tell application “TextEdit”
count words of document 1
end tell

Thanks to Niel for posting the solution.

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applescript, textedit, word count