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I've got a template for vimwiki diary entries that's invoked via this autocommand:

autocmd BufNewFile ~/Documents/wiki/diary/*.mkd :silent 0r !vimwiki-diary-template.py

But I want to be able to create other *mkd files in that directory without that template being invoked.

The times I want the diary template to be invoked are when new file name is like 2020-09-21.mkd. So I'd like to be able to change the autocmd to something like...

autocmd BufNewFile ~/Documents/wiki/diary/[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}.mkd :silent 0r !vimwiki-diary-template.py

But that doesn't work.

And I don't see anything in :help autocmd-patterns about integers/digits/numerals/numbers.

If I do ls ~/Documents/wiki/diary | grep -E '[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}.mkd' that shows the files I want this template to be applied to. But I don't know how to utilize that regex in the vim autocmd. Can this be done?

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The patterns used in auto-commands are different from normal regexes. In :help file-pattern you'll see that you actually need \\\{m,n\} to specify repetition of an item.

So, in your case, what you actually want is:

autocmd BufNewFile ~/Documents/wiki/diary/[0-9]\\\{4\}-[0-9]\\\{2\}-[0-9]\\\{2\}.mkd :silent 0r !vimwiki-diary-template.py

Note that in some of those cases, it might be easier to just repeat the [0-9] a few times, rather than to deal with this somewhat awkward syntax.

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    I saw that line in the :help but didn't know what it meant. When I saw the m,n part it made me think of a range rather than quantity.
    – alec
    Sep 21, 2020 at 23:35
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    @alec autocommand patterns have more in common with shell globs than regex
    – D. Ben Knoble ♦
    Sep 22, 2020 at 0:55

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