Question

I am trying to display a live word count in the vim statusline. I do this by setting my status line in my .vimrc and inserting a function into it. The idea of this function is to return the number of words in the current buffer. This number is then displayed on the status line. This should work nicely as the statusline is updated at just about every possible opportunity so the count will always remain ‘live’.

The problem is that the function I have currently defined is slow and so vim is obviously sluggish when it is used for all but the smallest files; due to this function being executed so frequently.

In summary, does anyone have a clever trick for producing a function that is blazingly fast at calculating the number of words in the current buffer and returning the result?

Answer 1

Here’s a usable version of Rodrigo Queiro’s idea. It doesn’t change the status bar, and it restores the statusmsg variable.

function WordCount()   let s:old_status = v:statusmsg   exe 'silent normal g\<c-g>'   let s:word_count = str2nr(split(v:statusmsg)[11])   let v:statusmsg = s:old_status   return s:word_count endfunction 

This seems to be fast enough to include directly in the status line, e.g.:

:set statusline=wc:%{WordCount()}