Counting Words written in Markdown

Last updated Jun 4, 2024

To document the progress of my book writing, I created a little script that outputs words written over time.

Markdown files in my Obsidian Vault:

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find ~/Simon/Sync/SecondBrain -type f -name "*.md" | wc -l

or another one:

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find src -type f -not -path '*/\.*' -name '*.md' -exec cat {} \; | wc -w

Explanation:

• find /path/to/your/obsidian/vault: Searches the specified directory.
• -type f: Ensures that only files are considered (not directories).
• -name "*.md": Filters the search to only include files with the .md extension.
• | wc -l: Counts the number of lines output by the find command, which corresponds to the number of Markdown files.

.

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$=dv.pages().length

Interesting is to count the words over time. As I have everything in git, I loop over git logs with this script words-history.sh:

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#!/bin/bash

last_count=0

# Iterate over each commit
git log --reverse --pretty=format:"%H %ad" --date=short | while read hash date; do
    # Check out the commit
    git checkout $hash &> /dev/null

    # Count the words in markdown files
    words=$(find src -type f -not -path '*/\.*' -name '*.md' -exec cat {} + | wc -w)
    
    # Compare with the last count and output only if different
    if [ "$words" -ne "$last_count" ]; then
        echo "$date,$words"
        last_count=$words
    fi
done

# Check out the original branch
git checkout main

Now I can run below in my Makefile:

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./words-history.sh > stats/stats-words.csv

With Rill Developer, I imported and created CSV and made a dashboard with

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rill init
rill start

Simple is beauty.

Origin:
References: Markdown
Created 2023-11-09