Date & Time Insertion

Part of any good system is a whole lot of documentation, including logging events.

We do this a lot, and because our customers are international, it's important to use an unambiguous date format, like ISO-8601.

While 1/3/24 and 3/1/24 aren't clear, 2024-03-01 clearly indicates year, month and day.

And, importantly, it's sortable as a string.

But it's a pain to type.

Hotkey for ISO Dates

We use two variations;

ISO Date, with CTRL + ;

Simply press CTRL+; in any app to insert the ISO-8601 formatted date for today.

e.g. 2024-09-13

; Define the hotkey for Ctrl + ;
^;:: {
    ; Get the current date in yyyy-MM-dd format
    currentDate := FormatTime(A_Now, "yyyy-MM-dd")
    ; Send the current date to the active window
    SendText(currentDate)
}

Date + Weekday

For extra clarity, we've programmed CTRL+SHIFT+; to add the 3-letter weekday;

e.g. 2024-08-31 Mon

; Define the hotkey for Ctrl + Shift + ;
^+;:: {
    ; Get the current date and time in ISO 8601 format
    currentDate := FormatTime(A_Now, "yyyy-MM-dd")
    currentDateTime := FormatTime(A_Now, "yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss")
    ; Get the day of the week in three-letter format
    dayOfWeek := FormatTime(A_Now, "ddd")
    ; Send the current date and time, plus day of the week to the active window
    SendText(currentDate " " dayOfWeek)
}

Future

• We might add a variation for the GMT datetime