Text Editors
Is it really that difficult to add word count into text editors?
One issue I have as a writer is choosing the right tool for the job. It may sound simple enough, all I have to do is key in some letters on screen to do my work which means for most purposes, there is no real need to use anything more sophisticated than the simplest text editor. Being on a Mac this means using TextEdit. However there are bucketloads of word processors out there ranging from free to seriously expensive and some of them do the same things in different ways.
TextEdit is, believe it or not, quite a capable word processor. Aside from basic formatting options such as setting your text to italics, bold, or underline, change the font size or color, you have the ability to add proper lists, table, insert a hyperlink into a string of text, adjust kernings if you wish, and many other options that most people wouldn't consider using even when they use a super power editor such as Microsoft Word or even Pages.
Indeed TextEdit had been my weapon of choice for a while until I realized that I needed to do word count (duh). Up to earlier this year, Apple's Pages doesn't even have the simple ability to show a live word count on the main window. In Pages '08 you had to have the Info tab of the Document section in the Inspector window opened. If you had to open another section of the Inspector Window, gone is your word count view and you’ll need to go back to the info tab to see it again which means abandoning your current operation or wait until it’s done before you can recheck the number of words you’ve put in.
I did however discover a neat little app called Word Counter which allows you to enter text into it and it will tell you how many words and characters are in your block of text. Its power however lies elsewhere. It is in actual fact, a crazy supercharged companion to a text editor that lets you do all sorts of word count calculations and even readability analysis in its latest version, 2.10, released in February of this year. It also works as a plugin for a number of text editing programs such as Pages, Word:mac, TextEdit and others, and it also reads PDF.
For some time, the combination of TextEdit and Word Counter served me quite well but after a while the lack of integration caught up to me because as great as Word Counter may be, it’s still a separate app. Sure, I can have it set to auto launch at startup and since I rarely reboot my computer that point is almost irrelevant but I still have to keep Word Counter visible at all times when I work.
My next search uncovered an app called Bean. Discovering this app was a revelation. Nevermind that this application is not much more than a wrapper for existing technologies within Mac OS X, it looks a lot more useful than TextEdit with a visual style more akin to Pages. It is also smaller and faster than TextEdit. Primary reason for using this? It had live word and character counts at the bottom of the window. At a time when all I needed was a simple word processor that does plain text and rich text formats as well as word count, Bean was a blessing. A cool part of it was live viewer resizing. You could grab the bottom right corner of the application window and drag it to resize the magnification level of the document. This was an added bonus that stood out. Did I mention it’s free and open source?
When Apple released Pages ‘09 as part of iWork ‘09 suite, they had added live word count at the bottom of each document window and included a full-screen feature which blacks out the entire screen aside from the document, the word and page cont, as well as iTunes window. It even hides Mac OS X’s Dock and Menu Bar. If you use Word Counter, its floating window will remain on screen. Pages’ format bar and Mac OS X menu bar are still accessible in this mode by moving the mouse pointer to the top of the screen. You can go back to the standard view by pressing escape on your keyboard.
At this point, Bean has become my text editor of choice, followed closely by Pages ’09. I love Bean’s style and Pages’ full screen mode. Thanks to Word Counter’s progress tracker, it remains a useful tool when I need to keep the length of my writing in check. Bean runs on both Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard and is also friendly to PowerPC Macs. For those looking for a simple, fast, and handy text editor, it's hard to go past Bean.
I have deliberately left out Microsoft’s Office:Mac because I was specifically looking for simpler alternatives to it, but if you prefer to use Office, thanks to Microsoft’s new licensing scheme, you can actually buy the Home+Student edition, previously named Student+Teacher edition, it costs roughly Rp. 1.8 million and hands you three licenses for use in three different computers as long as you don’t use it for business or commercial purposes.
While Neo Office and OpenOffice are fine free and open source alternatives, for my purposes neither offer features that stood up to differentiate themselves enough from Microsoft’s Office.
Filed under //
apple
bean
editing
iwork
microsoft
neooffice
office
openoffice
pages
text edit
word
word count
word counter
work
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