Assumed audience: People who write in Markdown and need to count the words
I just published v0.1.0 of count-md: a little Rust-powered tool for counting words in a Unicode-aware, HTML-aware, Markdown-aware way. It’s very fast — it counts this very website’s 434 files and 269,627 words in under 5ms on my M1 Max MacBook Pro.
To get the command line tool, you’ll need to have Rust installed, and then you can do cargo install count-md.
count-md is:
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Unicode-aware: it uses Unicode-aware word boundary splitting, so it works across languages.
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HTML-aware: it does not count HTML tags!
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Markdown-aware: it does not count Markdown syntax either:
> > ## Heading 2 in a Nested Quoteis 6 words, not 9.
count-md is also configurable. It ships with good defaults (at least: good in my view, matching my own opinions) but it also lets you include or exclude a lot of different semantic elements. Want to skip headings but include YAML metadata? There are flags for that.
It also ships a Rust library of the same name, so everything you can do on the command line you can do via library. (I hope to publish C bindings for that as well, once I have the unsafe code vetted to my own satisfaction, so you can use this from other languages!)
This is a 0.1.0 release because there are a handful things it does not support correctly yet, including GitHub style admonitions, task lists, embedded LaTeX math, and some edges cases around block HTML. I already use it all the time, though!
For more, check out the repository!1