Windows Keyboard Shortcuts

F5: In Notepad, enter a Timestamp

Posted in Applications by estephen on March 22nd, 2007

Quick, run Notepad. (You’ll find it under Start | Programs | Accessories — and if you run this program often, you might want to make a custom shortcut.)

Now press F5. Instantly Notepad pops in a timestamp, like this:

8:43 PM 3/22/2007

Pretty useful, right? If only more applications supported this shortcut. (We learned earlier that F5 has a very different function in Word and Excel.)

10 Responses to 'F5: In Notepad, enter a Timestamp'

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  1. Peter N Roth said,

    on March 23rd, 2007 at 6:38 am

    In Word, enter a Timestamp with Alt-I,T. First time, set your default Format.

  2. toen said,

    on March 24th, 2007 at 10:33 am

    in excel you can use
    ctrl+; for date
    ctrl+shift+; for time
    or ctrl+; [space] ctrl+shift+; for date & time together.

  3. Mako said,

    on July 2nd, 2008 at 12:09 pm

    I think this keyboard shortcut is really terrible. The date format is not customizable, so it becomes a nuisance every time I accidentally hit this key.

  4. estephen said,

    on July 11th, 2008 at 10:59 am

    To each their own, I guess! Personally I use this dozens of times a week.

  5. cardo said,

    on September 10th, 2008 at 7:39 am

    Thanks, for the tip. I always forget this shortcut.
    Is there a similar shortcut for the OS X?

  6. estephen said,

    on September 18th, 2008 at 4:42 pm

    Not that I’m aware, sorry! But I don’t know OS X at all.

    I use this one daily personally; it’s one of my favorites.

  7. jverzino said,

    on December 7th, 2008 at 2:21 am

    You can reprogram the function keys. Iuse a program called “swiftkeyboard” Here is what I get when I press F5, Joseph Verzino.

  8. timestamper said,

    on July 6th, 2009 at 9:51 am

    @ estephen,

    The point is that this un-editable format is not sortable in any way. Try prefixing a folder full of text files with the above timestamp. Open the folder and make sense out of the resulting filenames. Yay, all my morning files are together. useless.

    yyyymmdd_hhmm_originalfilename.abc

    Do this and all your files sort alphabetically. All your files sort numerically. Alpha-numerically. Use this same format WHENEVER you make a timestamp anywhere and you get used to reading it like music. Handled fine in IIS. Handled fine in Linux. OSX handles it. Even Windows OS’s can handle it.

    Being unable to choose the format of the datestamp is it’s fail-flaw.

  9. austin said,

    on May 30th, 2012 at 1:59 pm

    yeah it would be great if f5 wasnt refresh, as mentioned above chosing the timestamp format would also be good (something configured in regional and language options in the control panel would be convenient and powerful) keeping f5 as the expected refresh (so grab the file from disk again to see changes that have happened since you loaded it last) and setting something like alt+t as the timestamp would make more sense…

    but then again they still havent updated notepad to recognize \n as a frikken newline.

  10. Dave said,

    on November 27th, 2012 at 4:06 pm

    Thanks to all for the info in here. Very helpful.

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