Latex-wc
Word count and word frequency for LaTeX projects
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I was revising my proposal defense and kept feeling like I was repeating the same term. In a typical LaTeX project split across many .tex files, it’s awkward to get a quick, clean word-frequency view without gluing everything together or counting LaTeX commands/math as “words”.So I built latex-wc, a small Python CLI that:- extracts tokens from LaTeX while ignoring common LaTeX “noise” (commands, comments, math, refs/cites, etc.)- can take a single .tex file or a directory and recursively scan all *.tex files- prints a combined report once (total words, unique words, top-N frequencies)Fastest way to try it is `uvx latex-wc [path]` (file or directory). Feedback welcome, especially on edge cases where you think the heuristic filters are too aggressive or not aggressive enough.
HN · launched Feb 3, 2026 · 10 upvotes (top 47%) · 0 views
Niche: developer utility tools · 561 launches, 8 in the last 7 days ▼ -73% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 561 launches in developer utility tools →
Could you build this?
Yes Parsing LaTeX to strip formatting commands, math environments, and tokenize remaining words for frequency counts is a standard text parsing task.
Discussion
7 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: texcount (TeX Live default tool), detex with wc pipeline
Concerns raised: Missing source code repository link, Missing project documentation/link
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 133 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #58 of 134 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 84 days after the earliest competitor.
- Word Frequency Analyzer · ph · 2026-11-01 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Word to LaTeX (Offline) · ph · 2026-10-23 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- imagetolatex · ph · 2026-10-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- StudyVertex Word Counter · ph · 2026-09-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- WordCounter4U · ph · 2026-11-06 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- WordCountDesk · ph · 2026-11-01 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- WordCounterKit · ph · 2026-10-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- TinyDOCX · hn · 2025-12-22 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.40
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