Info panel and tooltips: Concise date display
AbandonedPublic

Authored by michaelh on Jan 6 2018, 4:10 PM.

Details

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None
Group Reviewers
Dolphin
Summary

I'd like to suggest to display the modified date more concisely.

Unless I make the info panel really wide it often looks like this:


Usabilty issues:

  1. I have to *read* those 3 lines to extract the info
  2. The tags-row tends to jump up and down while hovering over the files.
  3. Timezone info is useless for me
  4. Weekday info is useless for me for files older than a few days

It's a matter of personal preference but I find this


and this

much more pleasing.

Test Plan

compile baloo-widgets, run dolphin

$ touch now
$ for i in {1..35}; do touch -d "now -$i days" day-$i; done
$ for i in {1..35}; do touch -d "now -$i months" month-$i; done
date display

Diff Detail

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R824 Baloo Widgets
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date
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michaelh requested review of this revision.Jan 6 2018, 4:10 PM
michaelh created this revision.

Personally I prefer the long date format, but I see where you're coming from.

I'm interested in why you prefer the long format.
Personally I can see no benefit in learning that the 12. 12. 2017 was a Tuesday and that my timezone is CET.
I'm perfectly ok with long month names and also would prefer 'yyyy', but QLocale::*** does not seem to provide this.

I'll agree with you that the timezone is totally superfluous, but I'm a weirdo who likes to see the day of the week. Sure would be nice if there were some kind of really granular user-adjustable global setting for preferred date format that we could just inherit.

But I will admit that the day of the week isn't really that useful when you're looking at a date that's in the past, so I could consider that an acceptable loss.

So right now, Dolphin displays date strings like "Tuesday, December 12th, 2017 10:17:31 AM MST". That is a bit long, I agree.

Your proposal changes it to: "12/12/17, 10:17 AM"

For me, that's a bit too short. What I'd really like best is: "December 12th, 2017, 10:17 AM

michaelh added a comment.EditedJan 7 2018, 12:43 AM

I agree 100%.
In de-locale it would look like this

  • 12. Dezember 2017 10:47

Apparently that's not so easy to achieve. But I find these long dates so annoying that I'm willing to put much more work into this.
I think it's best wait to for some more opinions on this matter.

Sure would be nice if there were some kind of really granular user-adjustable

I've been thinking about that. In my view that'd be the KDE-way.
Where to place it? The property selection box should definitely stay as it is.
Maybe one more tab called 'Panels' in the 'General' section of dolphin settings

The right place for it would be in System Settings > Regional Settings > Formats. There's already a way to change your preferred format for various things but IMHO it's somewhat useless because all it does is let you use the format from another locale, not actually adjust the default format for your own locale.

I should have been more specific. It's not the verbose date display as such, it's the line wrapping that annoys me. In my experience that is only an issue in tooltips and the info panel. Maybe using a config *that* global is overkill.
In the properties dialog e.g. I quite like the long date.

FWIW this code used to use KLocale::FancyLongDate (see https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kdelibs4support/html/classKLocale.html#aaa95a4db4035832bc7effdf3dc560240)

which is probably gone after the KLocale -> QLocale port...

It's a shame QLocale doesn't have better formatting options. Looks like we're stuck with QLocale::LongFormat, QLocale::ShortFormat, or QLocale::NarrowFormat, unless you want to have a go at submitting a patch to Qt to add some better date options, which might be the sanest way to go...

Remotely related: Bug 358571

michaelh abandoned this revision.Mar 11 2018, 6:55 PM

Superseded by D11242 and D11245

Restricted Application added a project: Baloo. · View Herald TranscriptMar 11 2018, 6:55 PM