And you accuse me of addiction to the forum? :-)

Yea, I TOTALLY KNEW that was coming!

So oftentimes a forum posting pushes one into doing something that was already on the TODO list, or something on the even-more-populated started-but-never-finished list.

:)

So even though I didn’t get feedback from the OP yet, I came up with a little Pythonscript for this

And you accuse me of addiction to the forum? :-)

Here’s what it looks like at runtime:

If there are more than 5 choices defined (I defined 6), then if what you are looking for doesn’t appear on-screen you simply enter > and click OK and the next group of choices is displayed. When you see the format you want to insert, just enter its letter, e.g. c (overwriting ALL of the preselected blue text) and click OK. At that point the desired timestamp text will be inserted into the currently active Notepad++ file.

Here’s the Pythonscript that does this:

import time

time_formats_list = [
    "%I:%M %p %m/%d/%Y",     #  08:56 PM 06/02/2019
    "%I:%M:%S %p %m/%d/%Y",  #  08:56:15 PM 06/02/2019
    "%b %d %Y %H:%M:%S",     #  Jun 02 2019 20:56:15
    "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S",     #  06/02/2019 20:56:15
    "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M",        #  06/02/2019 20:56
    "%A %b %d %Y %H:%M:%S",  #  Sunday Jun 02 2019 20:56:15
]

# for format codes, see https://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-behavior
'''
%a - Weekday as locale's abbreviated name. Sun, Mon, ..., Sat (en_US); So, Mo, ..., Sa (de_DE)
%A - Weekday as locale's full name. Sunday, Monday, ..., Saturday (en_US); Sonntag, Montag, ..., Samstag (de_DE)
%w - Weekday as a decimal number, where 0 is Sunday and 6 is Saturday. 0, 1, ..., 6
%d - Day of the month as a zero-padded decimal number. 01, 02, ..., 31
%b - Month as locale's abbreviated name. Jan, Feb, ..., Dec (en_US); Jan, Feb, ..., Dez (de_DE)
%B - Month as locale's full name. January, February, ..., December (en_US); Januar, Februar, ..., Dezember (de_DE)
%m - Month as a zero-padded decimal number. 01, 02, ..., 12
%y - Year without century as a zero-padded decimal number. 00, 01, ..., 99
%Y - Year with century as a decimal number. 1970, 1988, 2001, 2013
%H - Hour (24-hour clock) as a zero-padded decimal number. 00, 01, ..., 23
%I - Hour (12-hour clock) as a zero-padded decimal number. 01, 02, ..., 12
%p - Locale's equivalent of either AM or PM. AM, PM (en_US); am, pm (de_DE)
%M - Minute as a zero-padded decimal number. 00, 01, ..., 59
%S - Second as a zero-padded decimal number. 00, 01, ..., 59
%f - Microsecond as a decimal number, zero-padded on the left. 000000, 000001, ..., 999999
%z - UTC offset in the form +HHMM or -HHMM (empty string if the the object is naive). (empty), +0000, -0400, +1030
%Z - Time zone name (empty string if the object is naive). (empty), UTC, EST, CST
%j - Day of the year as a zero-padded decimal number. 001, 002, ..., 366
%U - Week number of the year (Sunday as the first day of the week) as a zero padded decimal number. All days in a new year preceding the first Sunday are considered to be in week 0. 00, 01, ..., 53
%W - Week number of the year (Monday as the first day of the week) as a decimal number. All days in a new year preceding the first Monday are considered to be in week 0. 00, 01, ..., 53
%c - Locale's appropriate date and time representation. Tue Aug 16 21:30:00 1988 (en_US); Di 16 Aug 21:30:00 1988 (de_DE)
%x - Locale's appropriate date representation. 08/16/88 (None); 08/16/1988 (en_US); 16.08.1988 (de_DE)
%X - Locale's appropriate time representation. 21:30:00 (en_US); 21:30:00 (de_DE)
%% - A literal '%' character. %
'''

instructions0 = "\r\nEnter letter of your choice"
instructions1 = instructions0 + " or > for next group"
instructions2 = instructions0 + " or >(next group) or <(previous group)"
instructions3 = instructions0 + " or < for previous group"

max_choices_fit_1_screen = 5

prompt_number_start = 0

while True:

    prompt_number_end = prompt_number_start + max_choices_fit_1_screen
    if prompt_number_end > prompt_number_start + len(time_formats_list):
        prompt_number_end = prompt_number_start + len(time_formats_list)

    prompt_body = ''
    for (j, v) in enumerate(time_formats_list[prompt_number_start : prompt_number_end + 1]):
        letter_choice = chr(ord('a') + prompt_number_start + j)
        example = time.strftime(v, time.localtime())
        prompt_body += ' {})     {}'.format(letter_choice, example)       # leading space is important!
        if prompt_number_start + j != len(time_formats_list) - 1: prompt_body += "\r\n"

    if prompt_number_start == 0:
        if len(time_formats_list) > max_choices_fit_1_screen:
            instructions = instructions1
        else:
            instructions = instructions0
    else:
        if prompt_number_end == len(time_formats_list):
            instructions = instructions3
        else:
            instructions = instructions2

    prompt_result = notepad.prompt(instructions, "Timestamp Insert (at caret)", prompt_body)

    if prompt_result == None: break  # user cancelled the dialog box

    if prompt_result == '<' or prompt_result == ',':
        # show previous group
        prompt_number_start -= max_choices_fit_1_screen
        if prompt_number_start < 0: prompt_number_start = 0
        continue

    if prompt_result == '>' or prompt_result == '.':
        # show next group
        prompt_number_start += max_choices_fit_1_screen
        if prompt_number_start + max_choices_fit_1_screen > len(time_formats_list):
            prompt_number_start = len(time_formats_list) - max_choices_fit_1_screen
            if prompt_number_start < 0: prompt_number_start = 0
        continue

    if len(prompt_result) > 0:
        user_choice_letter = prompt_result[0].lower()
        temp = ord(user_choice_letter) - ord('a')
        if temp >= 0 and temp < len(time_formats_list):
            text = time.strftime(time_formats_list[temp], time.localtime())
            curr_pos = editor.getCurrentPos()
            editor.insertText(curr_pos, text)
            editor.setEmptySelection(curr_pos + len(text))
            break

It might best best to have a dialog box come up and allow you to select which format you want from a list? The list would be in the format of examples of the current time, each formatted differently. If you like that idea, we can proceed with that. An upside of this is that there need only be one script. Selecting a format and choosing OK would insert the time in the chosen format into the current document. The downside of this is that it is hard to have a “long” list of formats in the dialog box that Pythonscript provides. I do have a workaround for that, though.

Otherwise, with Pythonscripts, it is a one script per keycombination kind of thing. Thus, if you want 3 different hotkeys to insert 3 different timestamp formats, you have to have 3 script files that are 90% the same repeated code. It’s okay…but not ideal. I think Luascript is better in this regard, but I’m not sure as I don’t know much about Lua or the Luascript plugin.

So we will take some ideas from these links to build your final scripts:

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/16147/date-and-time
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/13792/date-time-again