[kinda ot] writing the date into a file when saving it

[Peder Blom]

On Mon, 26 Jan 2004 15:59:19 -0600
rob_spellberg <emailrob at emailrob.com> wrote:

> dear sir or madam ---
> 
> this may be a vi question, but i'd like to be editor-independent, if
> possible.
> 
> i want to self-document source code files when i write them to disk.
> 
> this would include such things as path and modification time.
> 
> ideally, within vi, i would like to have :w run a script [ that i
> would write ]
>    that does exactly what i want.
> 
> for years, i've been doing this more or less haphazardly during
> development,
>    until i was satisfied that the file was in its final form.
> then i would manually get it right and leave it alone.
> but i'm writing too much right now to keep doing this manually and
>    i'm something of a nut for documentation.
> 
> its easy enough to write a sed script to find a unique string and do a
> replacement. its only slightly more involved to write a glorified
> version of touch
>    [ which is kinda what i want, actually ].
> 
> maybe what i want is to go into vi [ or ex, or wherever ],
>    find where :w is processed and cause it to look for a script to
>    run.
> 
> i know about :so.
> i know about !command.
> neither are really "it".
> 
> i've been googling for about an hour and coming up almost completely
> empty. maybe there's a jargon word for what i want that i don't know.
> 
> so to get to the question:  what do you folks do?
> 
> rob spellberg
> woodstock, illinois
> 
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I guess this is not what you are after, but have you considered mapping
keys in vi? E.g. something like

:map = 1GO^[!!date;whoami;hostname^M1G3J:w^M

Now, pressing "=" in command mode adds a line at the top of the file
with current date, user and host, then saves the file. You could be
creative with !command, write your own script or c-program to generate
input.