[Feature Request] Customize (or at least pick) date format

[AI0867]

The date format in gmail is the US-centric M/D/YY (1/2/03 for 2 January 2003) one, which is deeply confusing for everyone who isn't used to it. It doesn't show up too much, as for recent emails, it uses the time, or "MMM D" (Jan 2) instead. That helps, but also means you don't really get used to it, and potentially get confused every time you encounter them again.

I would like ISO8601 myself (YYYY-MM-DD: 2003-01-02), but I'm aware that most europeans prefer DD-MM-YYYY: 02-01-2003 (or even D/M/YY: 2/1/03). Full customizability would be even better, but probably involves a lot more work. I've tried write a userscript to do this myself, but found the DOM too complicated to achieve it in a reasonable amount of time.

In any case, the short version is that I would be very happy if I could tell at a glance which component of a date was which, and customizability would be the cherry on top.

[leggett]

This is tricky.

I won't say definitely no but I'm not super excited about it at first glance.

1. I'd need to parse the date in all languages correctly to extract the actual date (a bit more than I do already for date grouping)
2. That format may take up more room than the date does today which could cause issues in certain layouts... but it is just a couple more digits so this probably isn't a real problem.
3. I'm also a bit unsure of why this would be better. I expect 99% of the email you look at is from the last 12 months (where the year can be assumed). So dates like Jan 11 and Thu, Jan 11, 2:03 PM (19 hours ago) and even 12/30/23 seem better than 2024-01-11 as the month and day (in which ever order) is the information you need.
4. You could say that I should only change the date when it is older and Gmail just shows M/D/YY but then I am not only parsing the date but also detecting when I should modify it.

I think my biggest issue is #3. The YYYY-M-D format doesn't seem better but I'm guessing this is very much a personal preference.

[AI0867]

1. I'd need to parse the date in all languages correctly to extract the actual date (a bit more than I do already for date grouping)
2. That format may take up more room than the date does today which could cause issues in certain layouts... but it is just a couple more digits so this probably isn't a real problem.
3. I'm also a bit unsure of why this would be better. I expect 99% of the email you look at is from the last 12 months (where the year can be assumed). So dates like Jan 11 and Thu, Jan 11, 2:03 PM (19 hours ago) and even 12/30/23 seem better than 2024-01-11 as the month and day (in which ever order) is the information you need.

99% of the time it's indeed fine, which makes it extra confusing when you encounter 10/11/12 and you need to think for a while to figure out what the hell that means.

4. You could say that I should only change the date when it is older and Gmail just shows M/D/YY but then I am not only parsing the date but also detecting when I should modify it.

I had hoped you were interacting with gmail on a lower level, and weren't essentially scraping the DOM to modify it, but if you are, that's pretty much what I was asking for.

I think my biggest issue is #3. The YYYY-M-D format doesn't seem better but I'm guessing this is very much a personal preference.

Well, I personally prefer YYYY-MM-DD because it's a standard, it stays the same length regardless of the value (until the year 9999 at least), and it sorts lexicographically, but there are plenty of people with other preferences, and I'm not married to it. All I really want is (the option to have) a sensible ordering of the components. YYYY-MM-DD is big-endian, D-M-YY is little-endian, but M/D/Y is some sort of weird middle-endian format that makes absolutely no sense to people who aren't used to the English way of saying January fourteenth, 2023. (literally translated, in Dutch we would say fourteen January 2023)

[leggett]

I will add this to my list of things to explore.

I will also note that you can switch Gmail to "English (UK)" and the date will change to DD/MM/YYYY in case that is better.

And to confirm, Simplify is entirely built on locally modifying the DOM Gmail gives on the fly. For greater security and privacy, I do not have API access to your email or lower level interactions with Gmail.

[AI0867]

I will also note that you can switch Gmail to "English (UK)" and the date will change to DD/MM/YYYY in case that is better.

It does, but it also changes a bunch of other stuff, because way too many stuff is bundled together into the 'locale'.