TextEdit Word and Character Counts?

Grab the free WordService package from the Mac App Store. As part of the download, it will install several Services that are not automatically active. One of these is WordService:Statistics which gives you what you want for any selected text in any application.

Here is the output from the preceding paragraph:

You can enable the WordService services via the System Preferences > Keyboard panel > Shortcuts > Services list. Some other useful services are selecting a text list of words and sorting it ascending or descending. In the above paragraph example, I selected the paragraph, then right-clicked on that selection to get the Services menu item on the contextual menu, then located WordService:Statistics…

No Apple here.

It's a basic text editor that can do rich text. That's about the limit of its capability.

There are four or so free (or nearly free) text editors that might have that feature. BBedit (does have it), Sublime Text, SubEthaEdit, Brackets (more geared toward web programming).

Not sure why anyone would need that feature. I've never needed it in over 30 years.

TextEdit is scriptable, so it would likely be simple to create a script to display those counts.

It was easy.

tell application "TextEdit"
	set docName to name of document 0
	set wordCount to count of words of text of document 0
	set paraCount to count of paragraphs of text of document 0
	set charCount to count of characters of text of document 0
	set DocumentStatistics to docName & " Statistics" & return & return & wordCount & " words" & return & paraCount & " paragraphs" & return & charCount & " characters" as text
	display dialog DocumentStatistics
	
end tell

Wrap it all in an Automator Quick Action and you can set a keyboard shortcut for it.

Pages is a much better document editor, and it has document statistics.

Pages v10.3.9 can provide a single-click to the following panel, that reflects either all text content in the document or that which one has selected. From the Pages View menu, one must select Show Word Count before these statistics become available:

Apple's Pages app does word count.