Deprecated. Use wz instead!

---

cw

cw (count words) is a faster alternative to classic GNU wc, written on pure Rust. It provides the same tools as wc, but with a more friendly interface and multiple encoding support. cw also provides its core functionality as a library called libcw that can target any arch with no platform-specific code. The Rust compiler leverages great performance with stupidly simple source code

cw differentiates itself from other wc clones by providing great defaults. cw will always count characters using the provided encoding, and thus, always providing the right count. Other word counters will provide, for example, wrong max line length on UTF-8 encoded text

To learn more about this project, visit it's GitHub repo

Install cw

Build and install cw from source (recommended)

Because cw is written entirely on Rust, is as simple as using cargo. If you already have installed cargo on your system, run the following from the commandline:

# Ensure rust's toolchain is up-to-date
rustup update stable
git clone https://github.com/Altair-Bueno/cw.git
cd cw
cargo install --locked --path crates/cw

Warning: This will install cw on $HOME/.cargo/bin. Ensure this location is on your shell's $PATH variable by running echo $PATH | grep '.cargo/bin'

Completions

Shell completions for Zsh, Bash, Fish, Elvish and PowerShell can be found under target/release/build/cw-*/out

# zsh shell
cp target/release/build/cw-*/out/completions/zsh/* /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions
# Fish
cp target/release/build/cw-*/put/completions/fish/* /usr/local/share/fish/completions

Pre compiled artifacts

1. Download the artifact that matches your OS and architecture from the releases page
2. Unzip the archive
3. Move the binary to the desired destination folder. Make sure that your shell's PATH includes said folder

Options

The same functionality you'll expect from GNU wc, but with some extras. To see the full list of options, type cw -h or cw --help:

tokio

cw uses the high-performant library tokio for IO concurrency. This allows cw to parse a file while the operating system is loading another one.

You can use the --multithread flag to force the multithread runtime flavour from tokio. This is useful when you want cw to use all CPU cores for heavy workloads

Bonus: alias cm='cw --multithread' for count multithread

Different encodings and Linebreaks

By default, cw will search for UTF-8 encoded text, with LF (U+000A) line breaks. Note that this crate does not validate any input. It asumes it's encoded correctly, although invalid encoded input is safely managed

Features

To use any of these features, add them to the --features "..." list. For example:

cargo install --git https://github.com/Altair-Bueno/cw.git --features "mimalloc"

• mimalloc: Uses mimalloc instead

Performance

See BENCH.md

Wishlist

• Full Unicode support (eg process Z҉͈͓͈͎a̘͈̠̭l̨̯g̶̬͇̭o̝̹̗͎̙ ͟t͖̙̟̹͇̥̝͡e̥͘x͚̺̭̻͘t͉͔̩̲̘ correctly)
• UTF-16 encoding
• Auto-detect file encoding
• Make cw faster