How to find the timestamp of changes in Vim?

Question

I am aware of the undofiles in Vim but they are binary and I don't know how to read them. I tries strings but it didn't help for my purpose.

I am also aware of the :changes command but that only gives me the list of changes with their location.

What I need is the timestamps of these changes.

I believe it should be possible to have that since there is the :earlier command but I couldn't figure how.

What I want is to figure out when the file was last changed and hopefully also the timestamps of all the previous changes. stat did not help.

Answer 1

Maybe the undotree plugin can help you. It provides a list of the changes together with the time difference. The S mark identify the version that have been saved in disk.

If you prefer to get the absolute date time of the change you can set:

let g:undotree_RelativeTimestamp = 0

It relies on the undotree() function that return a dictionary of all the undo states of the current buffer (stored partly in memory restored at buffer load time from the corresponding undo file). More information with :help undotree() for the description of the content of the return dictionary.