Measuring your writing progress with a git word count
5 minute readWriting a scientific paper is hard. Doing your PhD is hard. Writing your thesis is hard. And to make me feel even more miserable I decided to measure my progress by counting the net change in words I achieve throughout each day. I am by no means a productivity guru and I don't know whether word count is a useful indicator for measuring the progress of a paper. That being said, it is a reality check to see how fast my work is progressing. So without further ado here's the Powershell command that outputs the wordcount for the last 25 days based on git commits. (For the bash command, see the bottom of this post)
for($i = 0; $i -lt 25; $i++){$j = $i + 1; Write-Host (get-date (get-date).addDays(-$i) -UFormat "%Y%m%d") ((git diff --word-diff=porcelain "@{$j days ago}" "@{$i days ago}" -- "***.md"| Select-String -Pattern "^\+.*" | Measure-Object -word | select -ExpandProperty Words) - (git diff --word-diff=porcelain "@{$j days ago}" "@{$i days ago}" -- "***.md"| Select-String -Pattern "^-.*" | Measure-Object -word | select -ExpandProperty Words)) }