Word and Character Count – Google Chrome Extension

Jump straight to the Extension!

Yesterday, I wrote my first Google Chrome extension. The feature that was really keeping me on Firefox all this while was the Ubiquity add on, and though it still works, Mozilla has decided to put a hold on Ubiquity’s development.

Without Ubiquity to hold me back, I succumbed to Google Chrome’s seductive minimalistic interface, blistering speed and overall smoothness. And since the Chrome Extension gallery didn’t have an extension to count the words and characters in a selection, I decided to write one myself since it’s absolutely essential to me as a writer.

This is the first time I’m writing an extension for a browser (I don’t count Ubiquity commands as extensions as such), and the results are pretty neat. It took me well over a day to figure out exactly what the architecture of an extension is and I almost lost my head trying to implement things like message passing, but I finally came through with the goods :)

This is what the extension I wrote looks like – Word and Character Count:

Google Chrome Extension - Word and Character Count
Google Chrome Extension - Word and Character Count

I’m not much of a designer, so the logo for my extension is just a big blue “W” and the output simply gives the number of words and characters – good enough for my needs. Initially it was just a word count extension and then two people were kind enough to use it and suggest that I include a character counter too – which I did promptly.

So if you’re a writer using Google Chrome, be sure to install my humble contribution to the Google Chrome universe :D

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38 thoughts on “Word and Character Count – Google Chrome Extension”

  1. I really need this to work for my school work. I have been searching and found a few ways to count words, 2 of which were your ideas, but none work on my school website discussion board. I don’t know if they don’t recognize the text box or what the deal is. After the deadline extension works on the site but other extensions don’t. It says character count:1 word count: 0 no matter how many words or characters I type and highlight.

    Reply

  2. Hello,

    First thank you for developing this. It can be extremely useful for me as I work for a company that helps non profits send text messages, and character count is always a concern. Unfortunately, in Chrome, it is not able to count characters when I’m typing an email in gmail. This is my most common use case.

    This feature would make my month!

    Thanks,

    Mike

    Reply

    • In reply to Michael

      Thanks for feedback Michael. In think there are technical limitations to using the extension in Gmail…but I’m so far removed from that phase that I’m not sure I know myself now how the extension works!

      Reply

      • In reply to bhagwad

        Hmm … Someone else for his extension told me the same thing. ” download the crx from google ” But i can not save as the crx file on my desktop as a file. Chrome automatically install the crx file and removes it. I try it to download from firefox but the install button was disabled. How can i download it ?

        And if we can download all crx files and we can open it, that means all extensions for chrome are open source ?

        Thank you again! :)

        Reply

      • In reply to sunn_er

        You can get the crx file of any installed Chrome extension in Windows by going to this folder:

        C:/Users/%username%/AppData/Local/Google/Chrome/User Data/Default/Extensions

        Enjoy :)

        Reply

  3. Actually this is an awesome extension. I badly need this extension always. After new installing of chrome need to looking for this extension.
    Many many thanks for developing this kind of productive & sexy extension.

    Reply

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