Are these new operators? I don’t remember seeing them before?
Nope always been there
Change time is new, and I’m not sure what it’s for other than reduce need to use 3 operator (seconds, minutes, hours) as we’ve had to do for a long time. Change date has been around as long as the change seconds, minutes and hours has been.
I think you’re basically right — :change time to does replace the need to chain change hours to, change minutes to, and change seconds to.
But I think the useful distinction is that it works at a slightly higher semantic level.
Instead of manually copying each time component, it lets you do:
Date A :change time to Date B
which essentially means:
keep the date from A + take the time from B
So if:
- A = Aug 24, 2026 at 09:00
- B = Jan 10, 2025 at 14:30
then:
A :change time to B
gives you Aug 24, 2026 at 14:30.
That makes it especially useful when you have a separate Date picker and Time picker — you can combine both values directly instead of extracting/rebuilding hours, minutes and seconds individually.
So, it does give us a much cleaner first-class way of saying “use this date, but that time.”