Feature Request: Allow ISO 8601 Formatting for Date & time Properties Regardless of Locale

Feature archive
1

Use case or problem

In Linux (Kubuntu 25.04), the datetime display format seems to be hardcoded in the Properties metadata, defaulting to MM/DD/YYYY, hh:mm a for en-US. This behavior ignores ISO 8601 standards and creates inconsistency across platforms and workflows (e.g. breaking templates). Users should be able to choose a custom date format (e.g. YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm) for metadata fields, or Obsidian should honor locale overrides such as LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF-8. This displays correctly in macOS.

  • ISO 8601 is the international standard for representing Gregorian dates and times. It is unambiguous, sortable, and widely used in technical, scientific, and global contexts.
  • Obsidian users often rely on consistent date formatting for automation, scripting, and interoperability with other tools.
  • The current behavior is hardcoded and ignores environment variables—even when Obsidian is launched with LANG=en_DK.UTF-8 LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF-8 from the terminal, the app still formats dates using en-US conventions.
    • You can verify this in the Developer’s Console by executing: Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().locale, which returns en-US regardless of the OS settings.

Proposed solution

  • Allow users to define custom date formats for Date & time properties in the Properties UI or settings.
  • Honor system locale overrides such as LC_TIME and LANG when formatting metadata fields.
  • Expose a setting or plugin API to control how dates are rendered in the UI and metadata.

Current workaround (optional)

None that I could find other than to set the Property type to Text, which is sub-optimal.

1 Like
2

I could be wrong but think this is similar to this existing one: Properties: let the user customize the way Dates/Times are displayed (independently from OS) :blush:

3

That would actually be an acceptable solution as well. In my case, however, Obsidian seems not to acknowledge the OS settings at all. My Kubuntu system is configured to use ISO 8601, and everything is working except Obsidian, which is hard-coded.

4

Obsidian isn’t hard coded. The problem with Linux is that there are multiple places where the language and locale are defined, so I don’t know which one it is picking up. On top of this, modern packaging system on linux, like snap and flatpak, insulate the app from the rest of the system.

5
6

Yes, I have tried that, and also:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8@ISO
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8@ISO
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8@ISO

I should also have stated earlier that I’m not using the package manager; I’ve installed the latest .deb from the site. I’ll update my original post.

7

It doesn’t look like I can update my original post, but is this something we can get on the roadmap?

8

There is already a feature request for this. It’s in the second post. Continue there.