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  i=strftime("%Y-%m-%d %a %I:%M %p")
imap  =strftime("%Y-%m-%d %a %I:%M %p")

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().