LinLog

The other week I realized that I was often moving my mouse for no reason while coding.  Well, not no reason - I wanted to see what time it was.  You see, I have Windows set to hide the taskbar because I use 13" laptops and want to maximize my vertical screen space.  But that means that I have to hit the Windows key or move the mouse down to bring up the clock.

I don't have this problem when browsing the web, because Vivaldi has a setting to put a clock in the lower-right corner of the window.  So I thought to myself, "Self, do you think Vim can do that same thing?"

Well, it turns out it can!  In fact, there's even an article on it.  Of course, that's for putting it in the plain-old status line.  I'm using the airline plugin, so I had to tweak it a little.  Still, I was able to get the passable looking image above by putting the following in my .vimrc:

" Put the current date and time in the status line and keep it updated
let g:airline_section_z='%p%% %#__accent_bold#%{g:airline_symbols.linenr}%l%#__restore__#%#__accent_bold#/%L%{g:airline_symbols.maxlinenr}%#__restore__#:%v %{strftime("%b %d %I:%M:%S%p")}'
let status_update_timer = timer_start(1000, 'UpdateStatusBar',{'repeat':-1})
function! UpdateStatusBar(timer)
  execute 'let &ro = &ro'
endfunction

The timer update the time every second (obviously you can do longer if you want).  That's because, otherwise, the time won't update until you do something in the editor window.  This way it stays current, even if I'm not actively editing.