Today I Learned: Counting Lines of Code in a Project with Neovim

Today, I wanted to get a quick count of lines of code (LOC) in a large project I’m working on. If you’re using Neovim like I am, there's a straightforward way to do this without leaving the editor. The trick combines the find and wc (word count) commands, run directly from Neovim.

Here’s how:

The Command

find . -name '*.ext' -type f | xargs wc -l

Explanation:

• find . -name '*.ext' -type f: This part of the command recursively searches through the current directory (.) for files that match a specific extension, like *.js for JavaScript files. Replace *.ext with the file extension of your choice. If you want to include all files, use ``*`.

• xargs wc -l: The xargs command takes the output from find and applies the wc -l command to each file. wc -l counts the number of lines in each file and then provides a total.

Running in Neovim

To run this directly in Neovim, open the command mode by typing : and add an exclamation mark ! to run shell commands:

:!find . -name '*.ext' -type f | xargs wc -l

This outputs the line count directly in Neovim, keeping everything in one place.