Side Project: Count Words Notification with Git Diff

My daily goal is to write 1,000 words, then I feel productive at the end of the day. There are, of course, exceptions; writing theoretical-based (math) papers or programming days are more exhausting than typical everyday work. And the number of words does not tell anything about quality, but still, it’s a considerable metric. (If you’ve typed zero words in a day, you also did not write anything outstanding)

I’ve programmed a bash script that counts words in Latex files from given Git repositories. It therefore counts the number of changed words with Git-diff and displays it in a push notification on my mobile phone. The script is automatically called by a Cronjob at 17:00 (5pm) from Mon-Fri. For the push notification I use Pushover which offers a HTTPS API.

Bash Script

You can find the full bash script here. I know, zsh is the new ✨ thing. But I didn’t have time to get into it, yet. I’m sure my git-diff is compatible ;-)

The script has a hardcoded list of relative paths to Git repositories to scan. It loops trough them and executes git diff with some parameters:

• --word-diff=porcelain enables a high-level diff which is actually not supposed to be parsed but outputs all diff words as we need them for counting
• @{yesterday}..@{now} look for changes back until yesterday

Then filter the diff results:

• grep "^[+-]" filter for changes (+ for new line, - for deleted line)
• sed s/^[+-]// remove the +- prefix (the “porcelain” shouldn’t be counted)
• grep -E "[a-zA-Z]+" filter for words that consists out of letters (can be improved)
• grep -E -v "\\\\[a-zA-Z0-9]*[*]?{? ignore words that are actually LaTeX commands, e.g., \begin (can be improved, too)
• grep -E -v "^[\\b]*%" ignore comment lines
• grep -E -v "^[+-]{2} ignore empty +- lines

Finally, count the words:

• wc -w

These filters can be improved a lot! But right now, they are useful enough (for me).

Pushover

The word count loop generates a nicely formatted string and sends it via Pushover to my devices:

APP_TOKEN="APP_TOKEN_1337"
USER_KEY="#CAFFEEAFFE"

curl -s \
  --form-string "token=$APP_TOKEN" \
  --form-string "user=$USER_KEY" \
  --form-string "title=$TITLE" \
  --form-string "message=$MESSAGE" \
  https://api.pushover.net/1/messages.json > /dev/null 2>&1 &

Cronjob

Add to user’s Crontab:

crontab -e

Every Monday - Friday at 17:00 (5pm):

0 17 * * 1-5 /Users/rob/git/count-words/count_words.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

Motivation!!!

Disclaimer

The script is written for counting English words. The [a-zA-Z]+ word filter interferes with other languages. Maybe consider a better filter (or [\w]+) for other languages.