I’ve worked with computers for a couple of decades now, and I love Notepad… #sorrynotsorry, vim fans. It’s fantastic for writing - there’s no fancy GUI needing customization to fit your workflow, and offers just enough structure that it’s usable for a variety of tasks. It’s like the pre-markdown version of markdown. My favourite feature of Notepad is the ability to insert the date & time via. F5. This is a brilliant and elegant (and often overlooked) feature. Word’s insert date/time function pales in comparison to the elegant simplicty of F5. Even trying to use keyboard shortcuts isn’t fast, when it should be.

When I write Powershell scripts in VS Code, I had been manually typing in the date until I decided to write a custom snippet that would insert a header with all the things I normally add: script name, date/time, comments, my name. It’s automatically populated whenever I type in header <ENTER>

1. Open the Command Palette (View, Command Palette…. or CTRL+SHIFT+P)
2. Select Preferences: Configure User Snippets
3. Select Powershell from the list
4. Add the snippet:

    "File Header": {
       "prefix": "header",
       "description": "Output a file header with the file name, comment field, author and date",
       "body": [
           "#$TM_FILENAME",
           "",
           "<#",
           "",
           "",
           "Greg Beifuss",
           "$CURRENT_YEAR-$CURRENT_MONTH-$CURRENT_DATE $CURRENT_HOUR:$CURRENT_MINUTE",
           "#>",
           "",
           "",
       ]
   }
   

Since I’m using VS Code to write markdown now, I decided to do a similar thing to reproduce Notepad’s F5 feature:

1. Open the Command Palette (View, Command Palette…. or CTRL+SHIFT+P)
2. Select Preferences: Configure User Snippets
3. Select Markdown from the list
4. Add the snippet:

   "Current Date and Time": {
       "prefix": "datetime",
       "description": "Add Current date & time",
       "body": [
           "$CURRENT_YEAR-$CURRENT_MONTH-$CURRENT_DATE $CURRENT_HOUR:$CURRENT_MINUTE"
       ]
   }
   

This snippet seems to be more tempermental - when I type in datetime <ENTER>, usually it’s not replaced with the date/timestamp. I resort to:

1. CTRL+I
2. datetime <ENTER>