Novel Word Count for Obsidian

This plugin displays statistics of your choice next to every file, folder, and vault in the File Explorer pane. It updates in real time as you write.

Settings

Data to show. You can choose up to three data types to display side by side. Choose from the following:

Data Type	Description	Notes
Word count	Total words.	By default, a "word" is any sequence of non-whitespace characters. To change this, see Advanced > Word Count Method.
Page count	Total pages, rounded up.	By default, a page is 300 words. To change this, see Advanced > Page Count Method.
Page count (decimal)	Total pages, precise to 2 digits after the decimal.	Any settings that would apply to Page Count also apply to Page Count (decimal).
Reading Time	Estimated time to read each note.	By default, this is calculated at 265 words per minute (European languages) or 500 characters per minute (CJK). To change this, see Advanced > Words per minute/Characters per minute.
% of Word Goal	Percent of word goal for each note.	See Setting goals below.
Character count	Total characters (letters, symbols, and numbers).	By default, whitespace characters are included. To change this, see Advanced > Character Count Method.
Note count	Total notes.	Many people prefer to show this information on folders only; to do so, untoggle "Show same data on folders" and configure it as a data type there.
Link count	Total links to other notes.	Only internal links are counted; Obsidian doesn't count links to web pages.
Embed count	Total embedded images, files, and notes.
First alias	The first alias of each note.	If a note has no alias, nothing is shown. Since folders don't have aliases, they also show nothing.
Created date	The date the note was created.	On a folder, this shows the earliest creation date of all notes in the folder.
Last updated date	The date the note was last updated.	On a folder, this shows the latest edit date of all notes in the folder.
File size	Total size on your hard drive.

Abbreviate descriptions. Enable to show shortened counts:

Full description	Abbreviated
3,250 words	3,250w
30 pages	30p
45% of 2,000	45%
23,800 characters	23,800ch
12 notes	12n
25s read	25s
5m read	5m
2h5m read	2h5m
3 links	3x
5 embeds	5em
alias: july +3	july
Created 1/22/2022	1/22/2022/c
Updated 1/22/2022	1/22/2022/u
13.39 KB	13.39kb

NOTE: You can set your own suffixes (or hide suffixes entirely) for most count types by enabling the "Use advanced formatting" toggle.

Alignment. Choose where data is displayed relative to file/folder names: Inline, Right-aligned, or Below. All alignments work well with vanilla Obsidian, but Inline has the greatest compatibility with custom themes and plugins.

Show same data on folders. By default, the same data types are shown on notes and folders. You can toggle this setting off to choose different data types to show on folders only.

Include file/folder names. Only counts the text of notes with paths matching the indicated terms. This setting is case-sensitive and comma-separated. Any term starting with ! will be excluded instead of included. At least one file must be matched or the setting will be ignored. For example: If you set this to Included, CountMe, it will match folders called Included, Included Folder, CountMe Please, My Included CountMe, etc., and notes called Included.md, CountMe Note.md, etc., but not folders or notes called included or countme or somethingelse. If there are no folders or notes in your vault with the terms Included or CountMe, the setting will be ignored and all notes will be counted. If you set this to !Excluded, CountMe, it will match folders and files with the term CountMe unless they also contain the term Excluded in their path.

Exclude comments. Excludes any content surrounded by %% comment marks %% or <!-- HTML comment tags --> from character count, word count, and page count. This may slow down performance on very large notes or vaults.

Exclude code blocks. Excludes any content surrounded by ``` backticks from character count, word count, and page count. Includes DataView snippets. This may slow down performance on very large notes or vaults.

Exclude non-visible portions of links. Excludes (from all counts) any portions of links you wouldn't see in Reading View. For external links (e.g. [see example](https://uri)), this excludes the URI. For internal links that have an alias (e.g. [[note name|alias]]), this excludes the note name.

Character count method. Choose whether to count all characters or exclude whitespace (spaces and line breaks).

Word count method. This setting has been removed. In the latest version of the plugin, space-delimited and CJK counts are combined. Notes in any language should be counted correctly, including mixed-language notes.

Page count method. Choose whether pages are counted by number of words (default: 300) or number of characters (default: 1500). You can change the number of words/characters used.

Words per minute/CJK characters per minute. Sets the number of words (default: 265) and CJK characters (default: 500) per minute. Reading time is calculated as [word count divided by words per minute] plus [CJK character count divided by characters per minute].

Words per page/Characters per page. Sets the number of words or characters per page, depending on the selected Page count method.

Reanalyze all documents. Triggers a recount of all documents in the vault. Useful if you've made changes outside of Obsidian. (A hotkey binding is available for this command.)

Debug mode. Enables debugging output to the developer console, which may be useful if you need to report an issue.

Setting goals

To set a word goal for a note, add the word-goal property:

Comma separators are not allowed—the value must be numbers only.

On folders, the total number of words for all notes with a goal is compared to the sum of all word goals.

Excluding notes

To exclude a note from all counts except note count, created date, last updated date, and file size, add the exclude-from-word-count tag to the properties.

(The plugin will recognize the tag in any case and with or without hyphens/underscores, so you can follow your preferred tagging syntax, e.g. ExcludeFromWordCount, Exclude_from_word_count, and so on.)

Alternately, you can set the wordcount property to false. This property must always be lowercase and may not contain hyphens or underscores.

For another way to include/exclude certain notes, see the "Include file/folder names" setting description.

Safety

Novel Word Count is fully compatible with Obsidian 1.4+.

This plugin treats your vault as read-only. It never modifies, deletes, or renames any file or folder. It uses cached reads of all files for better performance.

Obsidian's API does not provide contractual access to the File Explorer pane, so this plugin uses duck typing to find it. This is technically undocumented, so there is a possibility that major updates of Obsidian will temporarily cause errors. If and when that happens, this plugin is designed to fail gracefully. In this unlikely scenario you may wish to disable the plugin until it can be updated.

This plugin's effect on the File Explorer DOM is extremely minimal, consisting of a custom HTML attribute and a few CSS rules. Style modifications are only active when the plugin is turned on.

Novel Word Count does not transmit any data over the Internet. All data is stored locally.

Installing the plugin

Search "novel word count" in the community plugin browser, or use this link.

Shout-outs

• For an expanded version of Obsidian's built-in Word Count feature, which shows data for the current note in the Editor pane, check out Better Word Count by @lukeleppan.
• For more features and improved graphic design around word goals, check out Writing Goals by @lynchjames.

For Developers

Development setup

• Clone this repo.
• npm i or yarn to install dependencies
• npm run dev to start compilation in watch mode.
• npm run dev-style to start stylesheet compilation in watch mode.

Creating a new release

• Run npm run build to make sure main.js and styles.css are up to date.
• Commit changes.
• Run npm version {major|minor|patch} to update the manifest and package.json.
• Push commits to the remote.
• Create a new release and tag in GitHub, both named after the version number e.g. 2.4.1 without a "v". Attach the files main.js, styles.css, and manifest.json.

Running the plugin locally

Visit the Releases page. Download main.js, styles.css, and manifest.json to your vault at VaultFolder/.obsidian/plugins/novel-word-count/.