How the Stats panel keeps track
9 May 2026
The Stats panel is where Waxcap™ keeps count. Open it with ⌘⇧I and it shows today's progress toward your daily target, your streak, this week, this month and your records. Why a daily target? covers the thinking behind the target.
What counts
Only writing in the Manuscript counts. Documents in Reference Material, anything in Cut Material and anything in the Trash stay outside the daily figure, so you can write a thousand words of background on a minor character and your streak won't move.
The symbols that do the formatting, such as the asterisks around an italic or the # in front of a heading, aren't counted as words. Neither are the notes you leave yourself in annotations, or the web address behind a link.
Your daily figure covers your whole day, across every project you write in. A day runs from midnight to midnight on your Mac's clock, so anything you write after midnight counts toward the new day. If you delete words, today's figure goes down with them, though never below zero.
Your streak and rest days
Your streak is the number of days in a row you've met your target. Miss it on an ordinary day and the streak goes back to zero, then starts again the next day you meet it. Today only counts against you once it's over.
Rest days are the days of the week you don't plan to write, chosen in Settings ▸ General. Not writing on one leaves your streak as it is, and meeting your target on one adds a day to it. If you change your rest days later, the days already behind you keep the rule that applied at the time.
What the panel shows
This Week has a bar for each day, with your target drawn across it. If you raise your target, days that met the old one get a hatched bar, so they don't look like misses against the new number.
This Month is a calendar. Green days met the target. The two copper shades are partial days: the darker one means at least half the target, the lighter one less than half. Grey is a day with no writing, and a softer tint marks a rest day you didn't write on. Hover over a day to see its word count.
Your Records hold the lifetime figures: total words, best streak, best day, and the number of days you've written. They only ever go up, so deleting a document or emptying the Trash leaves them where they are.