What is the best way to make a key print the current date?

[gerhard-h]

Here is my solution (quite cumbersome)
it starts with this in my .kbd file:

(defalias  
;; bottom 2 lines of kbd script no leading spaces 
dayiso (macro kp2 kp0 kp2 kp3 - kp0 kp1 - kp3 kp0  ) 
dayde  (macro kp3 kp0 . kp0 kp1 . kp2 kp0 kp2 kp3  )) 

@dayiso gives 2023-01-30 and @dayde gives 30.01.2023

but this is hardcoded and not the current date!
To fix this I scheduled a batch file to run each day to update the date
( runs on windows with german date format in the same folder as kanata.kbd)

@for /f "tokens=1-3 delims=. " %%a in ('date /T') do @echo %%c-%%b-%%a > todayiso.txt 
@date /T > todayde.txt
grep -E -v "^dayde |^dayiso " kanata.kbd > todayisokanata.txt
sed -r -e "s/([0-9])/kp\1 /g" -e "s/-/- /g"    -e "s/^/dayiso (macro /" -e "s/$/)/" todayiso.txt >> todayisokanata.txt
sed -r -e "s/([0-9])/kp\1 /g" -e "s/\./\. /g"  -e "s/^/dayde  (macro /" -e "s/$/))/" todayde.txt >> todayisokanata.txt
copy todayisokanata.txt kanata.kbd

Finally if you don't if the computer is not restarted I have to use live reload key lrld to tell kananta to update its config.

Is there an easier way?

[jtroo]

Edit 2: Code exists for this in the v1.3.0 branch. Documentation

I can't think of any way to do this easier in kanata right now, but this has made me think of some interesting feature ideas that would support this use case:

• allow reading the text output from cmd action to output key characters on the keyboard
• add a custom date special action to kanata
• add an embedded scripting language, e.g. Lua via https://lib.rs/crates/rlua

Edit: I've created an issue to track this: #296

[jtroo]

I played around with espanso today and it's quite good. I tried it out as an alternative to kanata's sequences - which I originally developed to replace my fish shell abbr shortcuts when working in Windows.

For the date example in the original question, it comes with a default :date example which could be adapted to different formats with different matches.

For how this relates to kanata, instead of typing the sequence by oneself, one could use a macro key on another layer to type out the espanso triggers, e.g. (macro S-; d a t e i s o) and (macro S-; d a t e d e).

[gerhard-h]

espanso indeed works (tested windows intercept driver)
I also used autohotkey as an third party solution: in kanata put (unicode Õ) and in ahk put

#Hotstring SE
; u00d5 Õ or any other unicode character you never use
:?*:Õ::
FormatTime, TimeString,, yyyy-MM-dd
SendInput %TimeString%
return

The last time I tested espanso with kanata it didn't work when typing the triggers myself, but this time it did :) wich is great.

[jtroo]

Ah right I forgot to try espanso without interception. It doesn't work without it 🙁. Looks like in the code they're always ignoring injected events. Seems like they could be a bit smarter about the code and only ignore injected events while an expansion is being sent.

Edit: I use the non-interception version on my work laptop so I wanted to get espanso working. I made a custom build with some not-very-clean hacks to get it working: #319

[eugenesvk]

With the new cmd command, does using AutoHotkey not become the easiest option?
(cmd "path2/AutoHotkey.exe" "path2/insert_date.ahk")

#Requires AutoHotKey 2
#NoTrayIcon
curtime := FormatTime(,"dddd MMMM d, yyyy H:mm:ss")
Send(curtime)

[gerhard-h]

Dos it work for you? I tried for autohotkey V1 and it didn't work

FormatTime, TimeString,, yyyy-MM-dd
Send, %TimeString%

running the commmand from a console works, maybe autohotkey V1 is not smart enought to find the current window by itself

[eugenesvk]

yes, it does, in both v1 and v2, not sure why you need to find a window, this just sends input via one of two methods, so similar to how kanata itself does it, active window should automatically get the result via the OS mechanisms
When you launch multiple instances they might interfere with each other, though, I guess you'd then need to build proper communication channels to the script to tell a single running instance to do something

[eugenesvk]

another idea to avoid having to launch a new script every time and suffer the downsides is to simply make kanata capable of sending a message to a running AHK instance
(#1078)

[eugenesvk]

Can test this idea with this build #1082