How to record my keyboard input to do statistics on it?

Question

I would like to find out what are the most common patterns i'm using during coding. So I'm looking for a way to record all my keyboard input while i'm in vim, preferably with timestamps. Then I could do some analysis on the most recent used patterns/motions what time does an action take, and find out things to optimize.

Is there an idiomatic way to do this in Vim? Shall I try and write a plugin for this? What would be the performance implications of doing something like this?

Thanks

Answer 1

Vim allows logging all input when the -w command line option is passed with a file:

-w {scriptout} All the characters that you type are recorded in the file {scriptout}, until you exit Vim. This is useful if you want to create a script file to be used with "vim -s" or ":source!". If the {scriptout} file exists, characters are appended.

Now that we have access to the input we can redirect it where we want. The following way for instance (*nix systems only):

vim -w >(./timestamper.py > log)
vim -w >(tee raw-log | ./timestamper.py > log) # If we want the raw log, too

Where timestamper.py is the following short python script:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import datetime

while True:
    if (sys.stdin.closed):
        sys.stdout.write("Input closed\n")
        break

    a = sys.stdin.read(1)
    if (not a):
        break
    sys.stdout.write("[{}]: {}\n".format(datetime.datetime.now(), a))

The script can be replaced with any other programme that takes input if you want to do something more sophisticated.

NOTE: After some short testing I found out that vim seems to keep a buffer of the inputs that it flushes at some point and on exit. This makes the timestamps fairly unreliable.