Your Writing Statistics – Watch Your Text Grow

Writing is often a quiet craft. You sit with a text, change a sentence, cut a paragraph, keep going – and by the end of the day it's hard to say whether you really made progress. This is exactly where the writing statistics in bun.ink come in: they make visible what usually stays hidden while you write. How much you wrote. For how long. And how your project grows over weeks and months.

One thing first: the statistics count you, not your text. What gets recorded are metrics like word amounts and writing time – not the content of your documents. The numbers belong to your account and are private.

Where to find the statistics

In the writer at /writer, the toolbar has its own button for the writing statistics. A click opens a window with three tabs:

• Document – numbers for the text you currently have open.
• Project – the overview of an entire writing project.
• Overview – your long-term writing activity and motivation.

That way you can zoom in – on a single text – or zoom out – on your writing as a whole, depending on the situation.

Document: a look at the current text

The Document tab always refers to the document you currently have open and active. It shows you at a glance:

• Words – the word count of the current text.
• Characters – the number of characters.
• Paragraphs – how many paragraphs the text has.
• Reading time – an estimate of how long it takes to read (calculated at around 200 words per minute).

For documents that are already saved, two more values are added:

• Saved versions – how many snapshots of this document exist.
• Change volume – how many characters have changed across those versions.

This is handy when you're working toward a specific text length – a short story, a newspaper article with a character limit, or a chapter with a target size. Instead of guessing, you see exactly where you stand.

Project: the big picture

A single document is rarely the whole project. A novel consists of chapters, a feature story of research notes and drafts, a non-fiction book of many building blocks. The Project tab brings all of that together:

• Total words – the word count across all documents in the project.
• Documents – how many documents the project contains.
• Most words – which documents are the largest.
• By folder – how the words are distributed across your folder structure.

On top of that, you can set a project goal in words. A progress bar then shows how close you already are to your overall target – for example, the 80,000 words of a novel manuscript.

If your project is linked to GitHub, a GitHub activity section also appears: the commits from the last 120 days, the commits this week, and the most recent entries. That way you see your version work right next to your writing work.

Overview: motivation over time

The Overview tab is the heart of it for anyone who wants to keep at it. It gathers your writing activity over a long period and turns it into something that motivates rather than merely informs.

At the very top is your daily goal. You decide for yourself how many words you want to write per day (the default is 500). A progress bar shows how far you've come today.

Below that you'll find your key numbers as tiles:

• Words today, plus the totals for this week, this month, and total written.
• Streak – how many days in a row you've reached your daily goal, along with your longest streak.
• Writing time today – how long you actively wrote today.
• Net words – words written minus words deleted.
• Average per active day and words per hour.

The streak is deliberately designed to be encouraging: as long as you reach your daily goal, it grows day by day. And if you haven't reached your goal yet today, the streak does not break – the day isn't over, after all. That takes the pressure off and rewards consistency over perfection.

There's also the next milestone: 10,000, 25,000, 50,000, 100,000 words and onward. A bar shows how close you are to the next round number – a small but surprisingly effective bit of encouragement.

The heatmap: a year of writing at a glance

At the bottom of the overview sits the activity heatmap of the last twelve months. Each day is a small square; the more you wrote on a given day, the more intense its color. Anyone familiar with GitHub will recognize the pattern immediately.

This view tells a story that individual numbers can't: the story of your writing habit. You see the productive weeks, the pauses, the slow restart. Hover over a square and it shows you the date and word count of that day.

How the numbers come about

The statistics run quietly in the background while you write. A few notes so the values are easy to place:

• The app compares the word count of your text at short intervals and derives from that how many words were added or disappeared. This is a deliberate estimate, not an exact comparison of every single change.
• Writing time only counts when you're actually active. Longer pauses are recognized as breaks and not included.
• Everything is recorded by local calendar day – "today" is your today.
• The statistics count independently of the branch. Whether you write in the main state or on a GitHub branch, your activity is recorded without changing the rules for how your texts are stored.
• Your deltas are buffered so that nothing is lost even during a brief connection drop.

How this helps you write

Numbers alone don't write a book. But they can support habits, and habits write books.

• Set realistic goals. A daily word goal makes a big project tangible. Not "write a novel," but "500 words today."
• See yourself sticking with it. Streak and heatmap reward consistency. It's easier not to break a chain you can see in front of you.
• Keep the overview. On long projects, the sense of scale is quickly lost. The project numbers show you where the weight lies and where little has been written yet.
• Get to know yourself better. Words per hour and average per day gradually reveal how your writing actually works – and when you're most productive.

The writing statistics in bun.ink are not a strict supervisor. They're more of a quiet companion that shows you, now and then, how far you've already come. Sometimes that's exactly the little nudge that turns a started text into a finished project.