Feature Request: Date format DD-Mon-YYYY

First off I want to say thanks for the great program! I am using it more and more at home and work and its very useful. It does however lack my preferred date format:

DD-Mon-YYYY

Day with leading zeros, Month abbreviation, Year
17-Dec-2019

This date formatting is avoids any ambiguity. Of course I can type out the dates in my notes in my preferred formatting, but it would be great to use the keyboard shortcut for date time instead.

Thanks

Thomas

1 Like

Interesting. None of the current formats uses abbreviations. Just numbers.
This could open a can of worms....

What about:

Dec. 17th, 2019
December 17th, 2019

What about localization? Or weekdays?

I am not dismissing your request. Just trying to extrapolate what that would mean.

So does YYYY-MM-DD which even sorts correctly, while your suggestion does not.

Thanks for the response. Either of your suggestions would work as well. For me it's a visual thing, seeing a date with the month either spelled or abbreviated is quickly understood. Strictly numerical dates don't work well for me (when I see the date 2021-02-08, Ive got to think about it for a few moments, is that August or February?) Maybe that's just me.

I have not considered sorting, I could understand that might prove challenging.

Perhaps allowing for the "insert date time shortcut" to insert a custom date format as a text string, while allowing the program to continue to function with a numerical date format?

Further:

I don't know anything about date localization, and I am not personally concerned with days for the week.

This is literally the reason I developed Slash Command plugin, You just need to install the plugin to adjust the setting (The format you are looking for is "yyyy-mmm-dd HH:MM" and "yyyy-mmm-dd", mmm is three-letter month). Then just type /now or /date to print the time string.

5 Likes

You misunderstood. This will be the start for others to come up with 25 new date formats. :wink:

Wrt sorting: Joplin itself uses a different internal representation anyway, so the app should not be affected.

I was talking about sorting in your notes: The editor allows you to sort selected lines. This of course won't work properly. Or when you use an external editor.

As I said, I am not against a new date format. I am just saying what might happen if we do add such a format.

Either way, it is not my decision to make.

OK I see what your saying, the sheer volume of possible date formats could overwhelm. Not sure how many requests you get for such things.

I had not been aware that you could sort within note content by date! Very useful in a few areas. I am understanding further why my suggestion would be problematic.

Thanks for the plugin, looks great, I had not seen it before. I will definitely check it out, it seems to do what I was asking for :+1:

I would tend to also support this feature, along with the idea that date formats should... not be selected via drop-down, but rather by some kind of pattern matching system. Maybe have a drop-down for some common formats (including, IMO, DD-Mmm-YYYY), but that system is just really nicely human readable by breaking up a long sequence of integers and special characters with readable letters for the month. Leave the numbers for the computers.