How to quickly search for today's date in a file?

Question

Question

How does one effectively find today's date in a file?
The format of the date is given by GNU's date(1)'s command as:

$ date '+%a %d-%m-%Y'
Mon 16-08-2021

What I already tried

This is how I got this to work right now.

Step 1. I have defined a vimscript :Date command to output the wanted format:

function Date()
   read !date '+\%a \%d-\%m-\%Y'
   -1
   join
endfunction
command Date :call Date()

Step 2 I open up the command-line-window in search mode with q/.
Step 3 I run :Date to output today's date in the command-line-window.
Step 4 I press <Enter> to find the date.

Steps 2, 3, and 4 have to be repeated every time to find today's date.
So, oftentimes, I just search for the date manually (e.g. /Mon 16-08-2021).
How can I make this process more efficient?

Answer 1

This will search for today's date:

/<C-R>=strftime('%a %d-%m-%Y')<CR><CR>

You can define a mapping to create a shortcut, for example, to search with <Ctrl>G in normal mode you can use:

nnoremap <C-G> /<C-R>=strftime('%a %d-%m-%Y')<CR><CR>