exa Idea: compressed "ago" dates

Dates like 16 Jun 2016 occupy reasonable screen space and requires mental parcing to determine how long ago it was.

In compressed dates mode it should be short and relative to current datetime:

Within 30 seconds of now => NOW (in red)
less than 60 minutes => XXmin
less than 24 hours => XXhrs
less than 32 days => XXday
less than 12 months => XXmon (maybe other colour starts here)
... => Xyear
more than 9 years => OLD (bold?)
zero UNIX time => --- (pale gray)

Aug 10 '17 23:08 vi

I love timeago, so I would appreciate this feature. Do you know of an existing fuzzy timestamp library for Rust? I can't seem to find anything on Google.

Aug 11 '17 18:08 jdanford

Existing fuzzy timestamp will unlikely be short and fixed width.

We can develop such a library (only displaying, no parsing), it shouldn't be too hard.

Aug 11 '17 20:08 vi

Good point! Are you interested in implementing this yourself, or do you want to leave that to someone else? I'd be happy to, assuming @ogham is okay with the general idea.

Aug 11 '17 21:08 jdanford

Quickly hacked up a crate: timeago

Aug 12 '17 11:08 vi

https://gist.github.com/vlnx/6cb393d73eda0294076a3af8ca2443ee

Nov 27 '17 07:11 vlnx

@vlnx , Is my timeago crate not fit for this job? Should something from that patch be factored into it?

Nov 27 '17 08:11 vi

I'm just new to rust and wanted to modify it more than pulling in a new package.

Nov 27 '17 16:11 vlnx

Cool idea, but I think, if something is older than 9 year, it should display the date itself instead of OLD.

Dec 16 '17 13:12 notramo

+1 for this feature.

FWIW, I use ls++ (https://github.com/trapd00r/ls--/blob/master/ls%2B%2B), which displays colored relative time. Thinking about it, I think the colors are a nice touch, which helps me find what I want faster.