Count Characters within Selected Text with Keyboard Maestro

For many rea­sons you might want to know the exact num­ber of char­ac­ters in a piece of text. Writing head­lines for arti­cles and blog posts, espe­cial­ly if you hope they’ll be shared on Twitter, is just one of many rea­sons. Until and unless Twitter removes that 140 char­ac­ter lim­it, craft­ing the per­fect tweet, with room for oth­ers to retweet, means count­ing characters.

[su_note note_color=“#deff96”]

NOTE

There is now a ver­sion of this macro you can down­load that counts char­ac­ters and words in the select­ed text. Get it here.[/su_note]

How to Use It

Highlight your select­ed text and exe­cute the macro using the trig­ger you select. Up will pop a noti­fi­ca­tion with an accu­rate char­ac­ter count of the high­light­ed text (see Figure 1.)

The character count of this article's headline, as returned by Keyboard Maestro.
Figure 1: The char­ac­ter count of this arti­cle’s head­line, as returned by Keyboard Maestro.

The Keyboard Maestro Recipe

The macro recipe itself is sim­ple. You can either recre­ate my macro with the recipe image below or down­load it.

Counting Characters in Selected Text with Keyboard Maestro

[su_button url=“http://iampariah.com/x_assets/misc_downloads/Pariah%20Burke%27s%20Get%20Character%20Count.kmmacros” style=“flat” background=“#47d600” color=”#ffffff” wide=“yes” center=“yes” radius=“20” icon=“icon: down­load” class=“button”]Download Now[/su_button]

How to Install the Downloaded Macro

After down­load­ing this macro, open Keyboard Maestro Editor. Use the File > Import Macros com­mand to locate and import the macro.