Coda Plugin: HTML Word Counter

So Coda 1.6 has been released. The major change appears to be the addition of a plugin system for adding functionality. Basically this allows developers to write small scripts that manipulate text from Coda. These plugins are then displayed inside Coda in the Plug-ins menu (or with keyboard shortcuts), so that they can be called easily.

Now, since i spend half my life in Coda, i wanted to play around with this and see if there was anything i could add to the community. Problem i found was, i dont really have many problems with Coda’s interface – it already does pretty much everything i want. BUT.. while writing an article for Smashing Magazine (which was required in HTML), i noticed that i didn’t have a good way to count the words in my article (since it was in HTML – Coda didn’t have a word count at all). Now, the whole beauty of Coda is in its all-in-one interface, so it kind of annoyed me that i couldn’t get a word count for my article without either opening it in some other program, or copying the content into my terminal and using wc.

Anyways, in order to flex my proverbial developer muscles a little and play with the Coda plugin interface, i built a simple plugin that will strip HTML and count the words in a document – it’s simple (like super-uber-simple).. but it does the trick.. and i figure there might be someone out there who might appreciate it. Basically, it strips the HTML tags out and then counts the words and then uses the OSX say command to read the word count out audibly – it supports either a selection block or the full document.

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