Add last edit time to documents

[vkbo]

It would be useful to record the last edit time for documents. This has been suggested before, but not been added.

The edit button at the top of the document editor is pretty much redundant now as all it does is change the label. The position could instead be used for a button that opens a hover box with details about the document, including when it was last edited. This would also be a new usage of the fuzzy time function that already exists.

[HeyMyian]

Will this be the "Date modified" of the file on disk, or the true last modification time of the document within novelWriter? I find that information valuable as well, but unfortunately lost it a couple of times because my files were newly synchronized (from GitHub or otherwise) with the current date. So that would be neat to have as accurate metadata within novelWriter.

[vkbo]

The file meta data is far too unreliable for this. I will definitely track it in novelWriter itself.

[HeyMyian]

Do you also consider adding the document creation date?

[vkbo]

Yeah, I may as well when I'm adding the update date.

[marek-lach]

I would only add that some software doesn’t use a precise date like Last updated 10/05/2023, but a more general way, such as: Last updated today, Last updated yesterday, or Last updated 2 weeks ago for example. It may be prefferable to give the user some choice over how to display such information.

[vkbo]

Currently, novelWriter displays the exact date with the relative date in brackets, like on the build tool. If I'm keeping the relative date for this feature, I will still display the exact date. I personally find relative dates rather useless on their own. I always opt out if it replaces exact dates.

[vkbo]

So, PR #1509 updates the document file meta data to the following:

%%~name: Making a Scene
%%~path: 6a2d6d5f4f401/636b6aa9b697b
%%~kind: NOVEL/DOCUMENT
%%~hash: 053cc65631403c15ddc112849dc7fcae44eb9d63
%%~date: Unknown/2023-08-25 16:56:11

The hash value is the sha1 hash of the text, and is used to check against overwrites of files that have changed outside of novelWriter. The date value consist of creation date before the slash and update date after it. The date is only updated if the hash changes, so it's a more accurate change date than the file system's modified date.

Of course, for existing documents, the creation date is unknown. I cannot extract it either based on file system info, because zipping, copying, git, etc can all modify that date. It will only be added to new documents created after this is released,

I'll add a GUI box to display this information as well.

[HeyMyian]

Is it possible to open existing nwd files in an external editor and manually edit the dates in?

[vkbo]

Sure, you could do that. Just make sure to use the same version of the ISO8601 date format. Otherwise it may not display correctly on the GUI.