What Are Quick Tips?

Quick tips are an ongoing series of short posts where I'll teach you something I've found useful. From time to time, I'll post insights I find thought provoking too. Here's a simple example:

Number of characters in a string

I wanted to count how many characters are in one line on this blog — UX best practice is about 70–80 per line for best readability. Using a web service is overkill for such a simple task, let's use our terminal instead.

In your favourite Unix shell enter:

$ echo 'How many characters in this sentence?' | wc -m

38

Or if you want to know how many words:

$ echo 'How many words in this sentence?' | wc -w

6

Done. Quick and easy :)