How about changing the default date format to the international standard ISO 8601 style (YYYY-MM-DD)?
The default value should be the international standard.
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@flowerbolideironman welcome to the forum.
The date format dropdown under Tools > Options > General should let you do that.
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I am aware of the existence of that setting.
Rather, I'm suggesting that we change the default value to an international one.
The international standard wouldn't be a very good default for anybody. Is it even used anywhere outside of IT?
A better default would be based on gelocation settings, but that's not easy to implement, and I think it's easy enough for the user to choose whatever format they prefer.
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The current default of DD/MM/YYYY is not used at all in East Asia.
To be neutral, we need to adopt an international standard.
The current default is indeed not good for Asia or the US, and the solution would be to pick a default that's not good for anyone?
Is it though? For example in this list, yyyy-mm-dd comes up four times: Listing of countries with their preferred date formats, ISO3166 code, ISO629-2 · GitHub Versus 51 times for dd/mm/yyyy or d/mm/yyyy.
ISO 8601 is also common in science (such as Astronomy) but that's also why the ISO exists. It's so that when documentation is exchanged internationally there is no room for error. Without ISO setting a standard something like an event date of 04/06/2025 could be read as April 6th or 4th June.
But no matter what format Joplin sets by default upon install many people will want to change it. Without some kind of geo-location to try to guess what the user's preferred format may be or somehow querying the OS, just picking a common one seems reasonable to me. It's not difficult to change and survives upgrades so it only needs to be done once.
At least it can be changed. There have been many times I have found an interesting program or web-app only to discover that the developer seems to believe that MM/DD/YYYY should be used globally, or doesn't even realise / care that other formats exist, and so does not allow it to be changed.
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Just my two cents, I prefer ISO 8601 personally but not in general for everybody.
In Windows 10 I changed the default to 8601, so in my clock, calender, mailapp, explorer filedates and in a ton of other places in Office365 it is shown that way (YYYY-MM-DD). Mainly because I like ordering alfabetically and chronologically at the same time.
But the cognitive changes to 'just see the date and understand it right away' isnt small.
Took me a week or so and after that I didnt need to look twice at a date to 'proces it' in my brain.
But this isnt intuitive for 'normal' people and I dont expect them to unlearn their old date notation and learn a new one.
Glad the option is there tho.
I live in Japan. In Japan, YYYY-MM-DD is common. However, YYYY/MM/DD is also commonly used.
When I look at this discussion, it seems to me that the discussion is centered on Europe/Africa and USA.
No, it's not. Certainly, YYYY-MM-DD is not good for America. However, people in East Asia will be able to accept it without any discomfort.
Yes and no. I live in North America, but I am also in IT and the only format that is not ambiguous is the ISO format. It is also the only format that can be sorted properly (from the string not the internal representation).
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