microsoft / microsoft/PowerToys

Feature request: Floating character/word counter that follows the cursor while selecting text

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#48,035 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Needs-Triage Product-Find My Mouse Product-Mouse Highlighter
Dominant language
C
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Description

### Description of the new feature / enhancement

While selecting text with the mouse, a small floating tooltip appears just above the cursor showing the live character count of the current selection. The count updates as the selection grows or shrinks, and disappears when the mouse button is released (or after a configurable timeout). Optional word count alongside the character count.

Think of it as a cousin to **Find My Mouse** and **Mouse Highlighter** — small, fast, cursor-anchored, app-agnostic.

### Scenario when this would be used?

A huge number of power users work against character limits every day and have no good way to see the count without breaking their flow:

- **SEO writers** — meta descriptions cap at ~160 characters, title tags at ~60, URL slugs commonly truncated at 24–75.
- **Marketers and copywriters** — Google Ads headlines (30 chars), descriptions (90), Facebook ad primary text, email subject lines.
- **Developers** — checking slug length, database field widths, tweet/post limits, error message strings.
- **Social media managers** — X/Twitter (280), LinkedIn headlines (220), Instagram captions.
- **Form and UX designers** — labels, button text, validation messages, alt text.

Today, the workflow is: select text → hunt for a character counter (status bar, if the app even has one) → look back at the selection. Most contexts — browser form fields, modal dialogs, PDF viewers, Excel cells, WordPress editors, image alt-text inputs, the GitHub issue editor I'm typing in right now — have no character counter at all. The fallback is pasting into a separate counter website, which is exactly the kind of friction PowerToys is great at killing.

A cursor-anchored counter would be universal, glanceable, and stay in the user's eye-line.

### Supporting information

- Reading the selection from classic Win32 Edit controls is trivial; reading it from modern apps (Electron, Chromium, Office, UWP) is the hard part and likely needs UI Automation API plumbing — the kind of cross-app polish PowerToys handles well and AutoHotkey scripts struggle with.
- Suggested settings: toggle word count / char count / both, position offset from cursor, hide threshold (don't show under N characters), global enable hotkey, per-app exclusion list, font/size/opacity.
- Optional stretch goals: show selection in bytes (useful for developers), show against a user-defined target (e.g., "47 / 160" for meta descriptions).
- Related community discussions confirm the underlying mechanics are well-trodden in AutoHotkey but stop at the modern-app boundary — a PowerToys-grade implementation would be the first to make this universal on Windows.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by evaluating the classic Win32 Edit controls and UI Automation API paths mentioned in the issue, then assess coverage for Electron, Chromium, Office, and UWP apps. Done means a cursor-anchored character counter updates during selection, supports the requested visibility and count options, and works consistently across the targeted app types.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
electron
Domain
desktop, operating-systems
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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