ChronoMeter

Epoch clock, timestamp converter, and cron expression builder — without leaving the editor.

Features

Live epoch clock

The current Unix epoch sits in the status bar and ticks every second. Click it to open the converter.

Display unit is configurable (seconds or milliseconds).

Timestamp ↔ epoch converter

Two-way conversion between epoch values and human-readable timestamps. Type in either field and the other follows.

• Seconds or milliseconds, toggled per-panel
• A second timestamp field in any IANA timezone, alongside your local time
• Warns when a converted value lands on an implausible year — pasting a millisecond epoch into a seconds field produces a date in the year 58531, which is technically correct and almost never what you meant
• Copy buttons for each field

Cron expression generator

Supports both Quartz (7-field, with ?, L, W and # tokens) and standard Unix (5-field) cron.

Three ways to build an expression, all editing the same schedule:

Structured builder — one text input per field, with live validation. Out-of-range values, weekday names in the day-of-month field, and Quartz-only tokens under Unix are all reported rather than silently accepted.

Visual builder — a tabbed picker per field (Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Day, Month, Year) offering every-N, ranges, specific values, and the Quartz relative-day forms: last day of month, last weekday, N days before month end, nearest weekday to a date, and the Nth or last given weekday of the month.

Plain English — describe the schedule in a sentence:

every 15 minutes on weekdays        →  0 */15 * ? * 2-6 *
Every weekend at 10:30:45 AM        →  45 30 10 ? * 1,7 *
on the last friday of the month     →  0 0 0 ? * 6L *
every hour between 9am and 5pm      →  0 0 9-17 ? * * *

Parsing is rule-based and deterministic — a sentence it doesn't recognize gets a clear message rather than a guess. Sentences needing a feature the dialect lacks are refused by name, so asking Unix for at 10:30:45 am explains that 5-field cron has no seconds field instead of quietly dropping them.

The three modes stay in sync. Parsing a sentence fills the builder, so you can fine-tune from there — and tuning a field rewrites the sentence to match, which is a fast way to learn the phrasing for a schedule you built by hand.

Every expression comes with a plain-English description of what it does, the next five times it will run, and a warning when a schedule can never fire (day 30 in February, day 31 in April).

Reading schedules where they're written

Hovering a cron expression in any file shows what it means and when it next runs — no need to copy it into the generator:

schedule: "0 30 9 * * ?"     # hover → At 09:30:00 AM every day

Hovering a 10- or 13-digit epoch value shows the date it represents, in local time and UTC. Detection is deliberately narrow, so ports, ids and version strings don't sprout tooltips.

Turn on chronometer.showCronCodeLens to show the description above each cron line instead of only on hover. It's off by default — welcome in a crontab, noisy in a file that merely mentions a schedule.

Commands

Settings

Notes

Both panels keep their state when you switch to another editor tab and come back, and across a window reload.

Fire times are computed in your machine's local timezone. A time that doesn't exist because of a daylight-saving jump is skipped rather than shifted.

All computation is local. Nothing is sent anywhere.

License

MIT