How to open the most recent file created in Vim

When working with Static Site Blogs, you end up creating files with very long names for your blog posts. For example, this very post has a filename source/_posts/how-to-open-the-most-recent-file-created-in-vim.md.

Now finding this exact file in hundreds of other files and opening them is a pain. Here is a small script which I wrote by piecing together stuff from the internet.

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# takes 1 argument
function latest(){
# finding latest file from the directory and ignoring hidden files
echo $(find $1 -type f -printf "%T@|%p\n" | sort -n | grep -Ev '^\.|/\.' | tail -n 1 | cut -d '|' -f2)
}

function openlatest(){
${EDITOR-vim} "$(latest $1)"
}

Now, I can just run openlatest source to open up the file source/_posts/how-to-open-the-most-recent-file-created-in-vim.md in vim and start writing.

This technique can also be used to open the latest rails migration. Hope, this function finds a home in your ~/.bashrc :)

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