Michael Rankin, an instructor at LinkedIn, wrote a tip last year about finding the word count in TextEdit on the Mac.
TextEdit
How to Use "Insert Pattern" in TextEdit to Clean Up Text
The Mac’s built-in TextEdit program has a little-known feature that’ll let you find tabs, paragraph breaks, and the like and replace them in text—or find patterns of them, even. It’s a very powerful way to clean up extraneous characters, so come read this Quick Tip!
macOS: Basic Tricks for Fast Text Selection
For this Quick Tip, Melissa Holt’s got some tricks for us on how to do text selection within a document, email, or webpage. So if you’re unfamiliar with ways to select text without clicking and dragging, come read this one! It’ll save you tons of time.