ISO 8601 Date Formats in Nautilus

Applications
1

Does anyone have any suggestions how to get Nautilus to display dates in the “Modified” column in ISO 8601 format? Specifically, YYYY-MM-DD.

Nautilus does not follow the LOCALE setting (d_fmt) in this column.

1 Like
2

Dates in Nautilus are formatted by nautilus_file_get_date_as_string(). It does not have the ability to output ISO-8601 format date strings.

3

ISO 8601 is good for interoperability and uniform international communication.

Neither of these concerns are relevant here. Also, it displays seconds. We don’t want to display seconds in the list columns, for obvious reasons.

4

“Obvious” is a matter of perspective. It is not “obvious” why not knowing when a file was created or modified to the second may be useful.

Further, ISO8601 specifies how to display seconds, but does not require it.

2 Likes
5

I can only emphasise as a user that
a.) that I want to decide myself what is obvious for me. A desktop needs to adjust to my personal needs, not the other way round.
b.) good defaults are OK, but information hiding, especially from novice users to hide complexity just trains them to be dependent idiots. So showing Timestamps should be the default in any case
c.) Standards, especially good ones like ISO 8601 should be followed, not discussed by developers who think they know better.

2 Likes
6

You misunderstand the nature of the ISO 8601 standard; it’s not a format meant for human consumption, it’s a serialization format, for exchanging data across machines and for accurately storing dates, times, and periods. The full ISO 8601 standard would be unreadable for anybody.

If you want Nautilus to use a YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS format (which is not valid ISO 8601) then you should read the previous topic on this.

1 Like
7

You already asked for this and you got your answer.

1 Like