I have used Scrivener for over ten years and really love it, so thank you for developing such a great application and keeping it modestly priced.
The one feature I consistently miss from Word is the ability to see the word count up to the position of my cursor. For instance, it would say something like 1,094 of 4,592 words. It’s super helpful when editing something that has already been written or when composing with some questionable material pushed below on the document.
I know that I can select the text above to see a selection word count, but that is impractical to do often or on long documents. Would love to see this feature added in Scrivener!
Perhaps it would be helpful to your wishing to expand on this point a bit. In what way is that super helpful? For me anyway, it is not obvious how that info would be really useful in general editing. But am happy learn.
gr
p.s. If everything below where you are typing is questionable material and you are just going to be pushing it along for some time, splitting the doc so as to kick that stuff into a separate doc sounds like a good strategy.
It helps me when I’m editing a long, wordy draft into something that needs to be within a certain word count. Assuming everything above the cursor is clear, tight writing that I’m happy with, knowing the word count up to that point gives me a clear picture on how I’m doing with the position in the document relative to the needed word count. It’s also just a type of input source that I got used to in Word and miss.
Thanks. I like this and it makes a lot of sense to me.
gr
p.s. In the meantime, here is a possible work around for you. I often use inline annotation to flag chunks of text that need working over — removing the annotation markup in chunks as I go along. I don’t know if this would suit you, but if you do this with your unworked chunk of text, then you can get a word count of just the revised (de-annotation) text in the editor — just by clicking on the word count in the footer of the editor. Assuming the include-annotations checkbox in the resulting popup there is unchecked, the word count in the popup panel has the word count you want.
I’d use this too. I’m a “messy draft, clean it up later” kind of writer, and when working with strict word limits, it can help the clean-up process to see where we are at a certain point relative to the overall word count. (Right now I just select the text above the cursor. Can get tedious, but I don’t do it very often so that’s okay.)
In case anyone doesn’t know: For quick access to the selection trick: Pressing fn+(left arrow) selects everything before the insertion point. Simple right arrow deselects and leaves cursor right where it was.
(But don’t accidentally delete that selection, mind you.)
Hm, that doesn’t work on my Macbook for some reason, but then I may have messed with the hot keys too much… (It scrolls up to the beginning of the document, but doesn’t select anything and doesn’t even move the cursor.)
I use a program called POPCLIP (for Mac). It is cheap, very versatile, especially for writing, and it will give you the word, character count for any selected text. Highlight what you want, right-click with your mouse brings up a menu. https://pilotmoon.com
Thank you! I was not familiar with this feature but just looked it up. Looking forward to using it! It doesn’t actually solve the wish list item opening this thread because Scrivener still counts the words in inline annotations on the simple word count that is visible at the bottom. (You can click on that word count to see the count without including annotations, footnotes, etc.) But I can see it will be a nifty editing tool!
