Using Current Date and Time In VS Code Snippets

Essays and updates on product, engineering, and AI by Chase Adams.

1 minute read

Previously when generating new blog articles (inVS Code, now I generate articles in Obsidian), adding dates to Markdown frontmatter was a manual step that required me to:

Determine the date
Convert what I read into the date format I use for frontmatter

As of VS Code release 1.20, Snippets have access to the current date and time with one of the following variables:

CURRENT_YEAR
CURRENT_YEAR_SHORT
CURRENT_MONTH
CURRENT_DATE
CURRENT_HOUR
CURRENT_MINUTE
CURRENT_SECOND

Now if I want a frontmatter "date" for Markdown for the current year, month and day (YYYY-MM-DD), I can add the following to my snippet:

date: "\"$CURRENT_YEAR-$CURRENT_MONTH-$CURRENT_DATE\""

Using the published date of this post, the expanded snippet produces:

date: "2018-07-24"

Markdown snippet with current date and time automatically inserted

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