Using Vim to take time-stamped notes

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Using Vim to take time-stamped notes linux vim codesections.com
authored by codesections 3 months ago | cached | 5 comments

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dsschnau 3 months ago | link

That’s too simple for a plugin? I’m definitely not going to write all that code. If left-pad is a npm package, that can definitely be a vim plugin.
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arp242 3 months ago | link
Assigning to a:current_time is kind of a strange thing to do. The a: space is intended for function arguments. I’m actually surprised Vim allows writing to this at all! It doesn’t work when you’re actually using it as arguments:
```
:fun! Test(arg)
:  let a:arg = 'zzzz'
:endfun

:call Test('zxc')
E46: Cannot change read-only variable "a:arg"
```
In :help a:var it’s mentioned that “The a: scope and the variables in it cannot be changed, they are fixed”, so this actually sounds like a bug(?)

Using local scope l:current_time is much more standard (you don’t actually need a variable there, you can \<C-r>=strftime(..) directly).

You may also want to consider making g:time_stamp_enabled a buffer-local variable, instead of a global one. That way enabling the timestamp insertion will only work on the current buffer, and not that other Python buffer you have or whatnot.
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  codesections 3 months ago | link
  
  Assigning to a:current_time is kind of a strange thing to do. The a: space is intended for function arguments.
  
  Thanks—I didn’t realize that (I’m definitely not a vimscript expert!). I’ll update the code accordingly.
1
hwayne 3 months ago | link
Have you considered using reltime()? Then you could just do
```
g:time_stamp_start = reltime()

" ...

function! TimeStamp()
     let l:second_offset = reltimefloat(g:time_stamp_start, reltime())```
```
1. 2
  
  codesections 3 months ago | link
  
  I actually didn’t know about reltime(), so thanks for pointing that out.
  
  However, I think it would add complexity here, rather than remove it. It looks like it would give me better-than-second level precision, so I’d need some code to deal with that extra precision (in my case, just throwing it away) and I think that would more than make up for the savings in terms of computing the relative time.
  
  Still glad I learned about reltime(), though—vim is full of surprises.