I write in too many places to keep track of. Trimming a meta description to 160 characters, cutting a bio down for some form, guessing whether a cover letter’s too long. Pages counts. Word counts. Notes doesn’t. Mail doesn’t. Neither does a Slack message or some plain text box on a random site.
So you select all, copy, open a word-count site, paste, read the number, switch back. Fine once a day. Gets old fast if you’re checking every few minutes.
Why the built-in counters don’t help
Word counts your Word doc. Google Docs counts your Doc, once you’ve dug the feature out of the Tools menu. Anywhere else, you’re stuck.
Why the website workaround is worse
It works, but every check means tabbing away, waiting for a page to load, pasting text you didn’t really want to hand to some site, then reading a number off it. That’s a lot of friction to learn one integer.
Counting from the clipboard instead
That’s why I built TextCount, a small menu bar app. Copy anything, from anywhere, and the word, character, and sentence counts show up in the menu bar. No window, no paste, no site.
It reads the clipboard instead of hooking into one app, so it doesn’t care where the text came from, a draft in Notes, a caption in a browser field, an email, a chapter in some app with no counter of its own. Select it, hit Cmd+C, done.
That’s what shows up the second you copy something: sentence count, word count, letter count, and character count, both with and without spaces, since some limits count the spaces and some don’t. If you’ve ever needed to check your character count for a tweet, a meta description, or a form field with a hard cap, that’s the number you’re after, no separate character counter app required.
Pro, if you want more
$2.99 one time, no subscription. Adds paragraph, line, and page counts, reading and speaking time, a Flesch-Kincaid readability score, and lets you pick what shows in the menu bar. The free version’s core counts, word count, character count, and sentence count, stay free indefinitely.
FAQ
Does it work in any app? Yes. It reads whatever’s on the clipboard, so it works with Notes, Mail, browser text fields, Slack, Pages, Word, anything you can copy text from.
Does my text get uploaded anywhere? No. Everything runs locally on your Mac. Nothing you copy gets stored or sent anywhere.
What macOS version do I need? macOS 13 Ventura or later.