Stamping the time and date into notes in Jotter by Zaweba

A note without a date soon becomes a mystery. You find a phone number or a list of figures in a tab weeks later and have no idea when you wrote it, or which call it came from. Jotter by Zaweba has a one-key answer: press F5 and the current time and date are typed in at the cursor.

The same command sits in the menus as Edit > Time/date, for anyone who prefers to click. It is one of the few commands in the Edit menu that adds text rather than changing what is already there.

What the stamp is

The stamp is ordinary text. Jotter is a plain text notepad, so there are no fields, no hidden codes and nothing that updates itself later. Once the time and date are in, they are just characters like the rest of the note. You can edit them, delete them, copy them elsewhere or search for them with the find bar.

That plainness is the point. The stamp records the moment you pressed the key and stays that way, which is exactly what a log or a diary needs. It also means it works in any tab: a fresh unsaved jot, a text file you opened from disk, or a configuration file you are annotating.

Jobs it suits

Running logs are the obvious one. If you keep a tab open all day for a support desk, a fault you are chasing or calls you have made, start each entry with F5 and a few words. At the end of the day you have a timeline without having looked at the clock once.

Meeting notes benefit in a similar way. Stamp the start, and stamp again when the conversation turns to a new subject. Later, when someone asks when a decision was made, the answer is sitting there.

A plain diary or work journal is another. Some people keep one long text file with an entry per day. Open it, click at the bottom, press F5, and write. Because Jotter brings every tab back after it is closed, the diary tab can simply stay open for months.

It is useful for small technical jobs too. When you change a setting in a config file, a comment line with the date next to the change tells you later when it was made. Just make sure the line is written in that file's comment style, as Jotter doesn't know what kind of file it is.

Using it well

Put the cursor where you want the stamp before you press F5. It is typed at the cursor, not at the end of the document. If you want each entry on a new line, press Enter first.

If text is selected when you stamp, think about what you expect to happen, because in a plain text box typing over a selection normally replaces it. Click once to clear the selection if you only meant to add the date.

Add a word or two after the stamp straight away. A list of bare times is hard to read back, while a time followed by "called the bank" or "restarted server" is a usable record.

How it fits with the rest of Jotter

The time and date pair naturally with Jotter's session restore. Your notes are written to disk 5 seconds after a change and every tab comes back the next time you open the program, so a log that you stamp through the day survives a closed window, a crash or a power cut with almost nothing lost. The find bar (Ctrl+F) then lets you jump to a particular entry.

Since an unsaved tab is named after its first line, starting a new log with a short title on the first line, then the stamp on the next, gives you a tab you can recognise at a glance.

Things to avoid

Don't use the stamp as a reminder system. It records when something happened; it won't alert you to anything. For things you need to do, Task List by Zaweba is the better home, and Jotter can stay as the scratch pad.

Remember too that undo in Jotter is a single level, like classic Notepad. If you stamp in the wrong place, undo straight away, before typing anything else.

Small as it is, F5 is one of those keys that changes how you keep notes. Once you have the habit, every note you write in Jotter by Zaweba carries its own date.