Word Count

Tools > Word Count (or the remappable shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+W by default) opens a Word Count dock tab, Scrivener-style: a Draft Target for the whole manuscript and a Session Target for today’s writing, each shown as a progress bar against the project’s current word count.

• Track — a per-project toggle for what counts toward the total: Manuscript folders only (any folder holding the Manuscript role, falling back to the whole project if none is assigned yet) or Everything except Trash (every document except Trash and Templates content). Trash and Templates are excluded either way — the toggle only changes whether tracking is scoped to your Manuscript folder(s) or opened up to the whole project.
• Draft Target — type a target word count to see a progress bar (current / target); leave it blank to hide the bar.
• Session Target — a separate, smaller target for today’s writing, measured against words written since the session’s baseline rather than the Draft Target’s running total. The baseline rolls forward automatically at the start of a new calendar day, or immediately if you click Reset Session.
• Characters typed this session — a plain informational count, no target: every character you insert or delete in a tracked document adds to it, so typing 100 characters and then deleting them all reads 200, not a net 0. It only counts keystrokes in documents inside the current Track scope, resets when a project is opened or you click Reset Session, and isn’t saved to disk — it doesn’t survive quitting and relaunching smaragd.
• Refresh — recomputes the current word count immediately. There’s also a dedicated remappable shortcut for this, Refresh Word Count (F5 by default), so you don’t need the panel open to force an update.

The total doesn’t recompute on every keystroke or every frame — recomputing means re-reading every tracked document from disk, so it only happens on a handful of triggers (opening a project, a git pull, a folder-role or Track-scope change, an actual save, or an explicit Refresh) and always runs on a background thread so it never freezes the UI. Creating, deleting, moving, or renaming a document doesn’t trigger a recompute on its own — click Refresh (or its shortcut) if the count looks stale after one of those.

A compact 340 : 12,345 / 50,000 words segment (characters typed this session, then current/target words) shows in the status bar, next to the Pomodoro countdown, any time a Draft Target is set — the Session Target is dock-tab-only, not mirrored in the status bar.