Best way to insert timestamp in Vim?

Question

EditPad Lite has a nice feature (CTRL-E, CTRL-I) which inserts a time stamp e.g. \"2008-09-11 10:34:53\" into your code.

Answer 1

To make it work cross-platform, just put the following in your vimrc:

nmap <F3> i<C-R>=strftime("%Y-%m-%d %a %I:%M %p")<CR><Esc>
imap <F3> <C-R>=strftime("%Y-%m-%d %a %I:%M %p")<CR>

Now you can just press F3 any time inside Vi/Vim and you'll get a timestamp like 2016-01-25 Mo 12:44 inserted at the cursor.

For a complete description of the available parameters check the documentation of the C function strftime().

Answer 2

Why is everybody using :r!? Find a blank line and type !!date from command-mode. Save a keystroke!

[n.b. This will pipe the current line into stdin, and then replace the line with the command output; hence the "find a blank line" part.]

Answer 3

For a unix timestamp:

:r! date +\%s

You can also map this command to a key (for example F12) in VIM if you use it a lot:

Put this in your .vimrc:

map  <F12> :r! date +\%s<cr>

Answer 4

Another quick way not included by previous answers: type-

!!date

Answer 5

Unix,use:

!!date

Windows, use:

!!date /t

More details:see Insert_current_date_or_time

Answer 6

As an extension to @Swaroop C H's answer,

^R=strftime("%FT%T%z")

is a more compact form that will also print the time zone (actually the difference from UTC, in an ISO-8601-compliant form).

If you prefer to use an external tool for some reason,

:r !date --rfc-3339=s

will give you a full RFC-3339 compliant timestamp; use ns instead of s for Spock-like precision, and pipe through tr ' ' T to use a capital T instead of a space between date and time.

Also you might find it useful to know that

:source somefile.vim

will read in commands from somefile.vim: this way you could set up a custom set of mappings, etc., and then load it when you're using vim on that account.