List View Date Format should be more informative

[abodedis]

Problem

The List View Date format for recent dates currently will say "Today, Yesterday, [Day of Week]", etc. for files displayed in the list view. The format for older dates will be in a conventional date format. This is often intuitive and convenient.

However, a potential problem occurs when a user wants to manage files in a list that have a certain date (such as when quickly browsing and selecting all files in "July" to move to another folder). The "Today/Yesterday/[Day of Week]" format now requires the user to perform mental processing to determine whether "[Day of Week]" is in July or not.

Proposal

a) The list view should always have the conventional date and time according to the format the user specified in the System Settings. For more recent files, "Today/Yesterday/[Day of Week]" can be added for convenience.

b) There should be no instance where the date is listed but not the time, and vice versa. This is needed because a List view is the closest thing to a detailed file view aside from right clicking and viewing File Properties. Useful Date and Time Information should not be withheld in the List view for the sake of simplifying the user interface as it actually creates a mental obstacle.

c) For the recent files, also display "X days ago" up to a reasonable limit, such as "7" days. Having [Day of Week] with no other context may also demand unneeded mental processing from the user to determine how many days ago for a file that says "Friday".

For example: "[FILE]..............................................................Yesterday, Aug 6, 2021 at 8:32 PM "[FILE]..............................................................Friday, Aug 12, 2021 (4 days ago) at 8:32 PM

Implementing these features will help make the List View in Files informative, yet simple and elegant.

Prior Art

[jeremypw]

Thanks for suggestion! It would be nice to be able to filter the view anyway (see e.g. #1122 and #1124) which would also help with this issue.

[jeremypw]

@abodedis I have proposed a PR that exposes the available datetime formats in the UI so that the user can quickly change the format for a particular purpose (in your case to one that shows the month). We could potentially add one or more other formats - perhaps a "verbose" format like the last one you mentioned.