Hexo Word Counter

Word count and time to read for articles in Hexo blog.

The word count is based on Unicode® Standard Annex #29. Thus, when multiple languages are present in the post content, the total word count can be accurately counted.

With the power of Rust, this plugin is faster than almost all other Hexo plugins that offer similar functionality. See the benchmark below.

Installation

npm install hexo-word-counter
hexo clean

Usage

You can set options of hexo-word-counter in the Hexo's _config.yml (which locates in the root dir of your blog):

symbols_count_time:
  symbols: true
  time: true
  total_symbols: true
  total_time: true
  exclude_codeblock: false
  wpm: 275
  suffix: "mins."

If symbols_count_time option is not specified, the default parameters will be used.

Parameters

• wpm – Words Per Minute. Default: 275. You can check this here.
  • Slow ≈ 200
  • Normal ≈ 275
  • Fast ≈ 350
• suffix – If time to read less then 60 minutes, added suffix as string parameter.
  If not defined, mins. will be used as default.
• exclude_codeblock – Allow to exclude all content inside code blocks for more accurate words counting.
  If not defined, false will be used as default.

Note for Chinese users: if you write posts in Chinese at most cases (without mixed English), recommended to set wpm to 300.
But if you usually mix your posts with English, set wpm to 275 will be nice.

For NexT Theme

This plugin integrated in «NexT» and after plugin enabled in main Hexo config, you may adjust options in NexT config:

post_meta:
  item_text: true

symbols_count_time:
  separated_meta: true
  item_text_total: false

Development

You have to prepare both Node.js and rust toolchain to develop this plugin.

git clone https://github.com/next-theme/hexo-word-counter.git
cd hexo-word-counter
npm install

You can run tests with or without coverage feedback:

npm test
npm run test-cov

And you can install the development version in your blog:

cd blog
npm i ../path/to/hexo-word-counter

Theme Integration

If you're a theme developer, you can use the following code to integrate this plugin.

Word Count

The syntax is different depending on the templating engine of the theme.

For Nunjucks / Swig:

{{ symbolsCount(post) }}

For Ejs:

<%- symbolsCount(post) %>

For Pug / Jade:

span=symbolsCount(post)

In the latter part, we use Nunjucks syntax as an example.

Post Reading Time

{{ symbolsTime(post) }}

Or with predefined parameters:

{{ symbolsTime(post, awl, wpm, suffix) }}

Total Word Count

{{ symbolsCountTotal(site) }}

Total Post Reading Time

{{ symbolsTimeTotal(site) }}

Or with predefined parameters:

{{ symbolsTimeTotal(site, awl, wpm, suffix) }}

Benchmark

See GitHub actions.

Plugin installed	Time of hexo g
Baseline	19.48s
hexo-word-counter	19.63s (+0.78%)
hexo-symbols-count-time	19.86s (+1.99%)
hexo-wordcount	21.44s (+10.08%)
hexo-reading-time	23.81s (+22.26%)