A command-line tool to continuously display the number of matches for given regexes in a given file.
First, run yarn; yarn build to install dependencies and run the Typescript compiler. This need only be done once.
Then, to use this command-line tool, run node out/index.js <file> <regex> <regex>..., with the file you want to watch and the regexes you want to watch for.
Monitor current word- and line-count:
node out/index.js foo.txt "\w+" "\n"
Monitor current word-, line-, and sentence-count:
node out/index.js foo.txt "\w+" "\n" "[.?\!]\s"
How many TODO comments are there in this file?
node out/index.js index.js "TODO
How often am I mentioning each of the main characters in this story?
node out/index.js draft_1.txt "Alice" "Bob"
How many sentences are there, and how many contain dialogue?
node out/index.js draft_1.txt "[.?!]\s" "[\"“][^\"“”]+[\"”]"
I've been accused of overusing dashes and semicolons. Let's keep an eye on that:
node out/index.js draft_1.txt ";" " [-–] "