GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 333732
"Human readable" date format shows too much information
Last modified: 2011-03-31 17:40:21 UTC
Please describe the problem: The "human readable" date format option is nice. However, it provides too much information. If a file was modified today, it appears like this: today at 10:30:01 Is it really necessary to provide detail to the level that we include the exact second it was modified? Beyond "yesterday", the full date is shown, eg. Friday, March 3 2006 at 4:29:09 How about changing this date format to be as brief and useful as possible? Here are some examples of what I think would be useful amounts of date information: today at 10:30 yesterday at 10:30 Friday at 10:30 Jan 10 Feb 2002 In my examples here, the amount of information is scaled to fit the age of the file. For example, the day of the week is useful if it is a recent file, but not if it is an older file (who cares what day of the week a file was created if it was created in 2002?) Note that the file chooser already does something like this, it would be nice to make Nautilus consistent. Steps to reproduce: Actual results: Expected results: Does this happen every time? Other information:
Thanks for your bug report! I like the proposed wording for each of the detail levels, i.e. today, yesterday, this week, this year. I'm not sure whether we should hide the time from entries older than a week, though. Milestoning to 2.16 because it missed string freeze. CCing usability team to get some feedback.
FWIW, OSX (especially Mail, but also Finder) handles this quite nicely too, but a little differently-- it just alters the amount of detail depending on how wide the "date" field is. (Unfortunately, nautilus doesn't resize fields to fit the window, it introduces a horizontal scrollbar instead, which is a little unpleasant.) So if the date field is narrow, you only get "Today", "Yesterday", "7/3/05", but if it's wider you get "Today 13:15", "Yesterday 12:58", "7 March 2005 10:12" etc. I agree we should make nautilus and the file chooser consistent, however we end up deciding to do it. Incidentally, we should also capitalise the first letter of "Today", "Yesterday" etc... looks bad the way it is just now.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 346337 ***