Counting Words, Characters and Lines with Notepad++

One of the best text editors in Windows is Notepad++ as it is lightweight, it provides a wealth of useful functionality –let alone the possible extensions through plugins.

File Summary

A useful feature of Notepad++ is that you can easily get a view on the size metrics of the document you are currently working on (characters, words, lines, etc). However, the menu is not that intuitive on finding that capability. So in order to get the above values you should go to:

View >> Summary…

The summary contains the following:

• Full path
• Created
• Modified
• File length (in byte)
• Characters (without blanks)
• Words
• Lines
• Current document length

Selected Area Summary

Nevertheless, the above summary provides file-level statistics and it may only provide the number of bytes and characters of a selected area. In order to count the word, characters, lines, etc. for just a selected part of the file you can install and use the TextFX Character plugin through the Plugin Manager:

Plugins >> Plugin Manager >> Show Plugin Manager

Then, at the Available tab select the TextFX Character plugin and install it. You may be required to restart the application. Afterwards select a text range and use the following menu:

TextFX >> TextFX Tools >> Word Count

The window that pops up provides the following information:

• Words
• Characters (no spaces)
• Characters
• UTF-8 Characters
• UTF-8 Efficiency
• Lines
• Longest Line
• Shortest nonblank line
• Nonblank lines