Re: feature suggestion: apply datetime prompt magic to selected region

[Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>]

Brian van den Broek <brian.van.den.broek@gmail.com> wrote:

> ... 
> Say I have a buffer with the following contents:
> 
> <------>
> Some text in a buffer with orgmode enabled.
> 
> Blah blah, Tuesday at 3pm blah blah September 19, 2003, 14:00-15:00 blah blah
> <------>
> 
> As it is now, if I kill the text "Tuesday at 3pm", and with cursor
> where I killed hit C-u C-c . to invoke org-time-stamp with prefix
> argument, and then yank the just killed text into the resulting
> prompt, and repeat for the text "Sept. ... 15:00", I get
> 
> <------>
> Some text in a buffer with orgmode enabled.
> 
> Blah blah, <2011-10-11 Tue 15:00> blah blah <2003-09-19 Fri
> 14:00-15:00> blah blah
> <------>
> 
> (the exact way the org-time-stamp command interprets the text is a
> function of the date that it is run and of the value of
> org-read-date-prefer-future, and possibly other variables, too.)
> 
> What I was suggesting was it would be cool and a small time-saver if I
> could select the text "Tuesday at 3pm" and hit C-u C-c . and have the
> region replaced with the stamp <2011-10-11 Tue 15:00>, entirely
> bypassing the kill and yank steps. (Achim correctly suggested that
> what I want to do could be done with a keyboard macro. I still think
> it would be neat.)

So we are talking about saving two keystrokes: not worth it in my
opinion for interactive use (unless you have a bunch of things to do, as
you apparently did - macros or a wrapped org-time-stamp assigned to some
key is probably the best solution for that).

The reason why I don't think that anything more needs to be done in org,
is that the major time waster here is *not* the two extra keystrokes:
it's selecting the region(s) to cut/paste - I don't see any way to
improve that.

Nick