Properties: let the user customize the way Dates/Times are displayed (independently from OS)

I came up with a workaround for Windows, maybe cumbersome but it does work.

This is true but the displayed format defined at OS level can differ from the OS level language setting. This is also inconsistent: I can overwrite the language in the Settings of Obsidian but I canā€™t set the date format independently from it. Please we know this is just a cosmetic change but having a different date format in Obsidian and the OS, is very annoying.

Is there a sign of willingness from the developers to change this?

I totally support this. Iā€™m struggling with dates as well. It seems something has been changed recently. In properties the date changed (for me in German: ā€œLetzte Ƅnderungā€ for today displays 20.02.2006. Today is 6.2.2025! When I change the type to text it displays the correct date. But I use 3 different date related properties. And I want to use them to sort lists and tables. But that doesnā€™t work when I change the date related property from date to text. Why is this so complicated? Iā€™d be happy if the date fields would exactly match the system preferences on my Mac - but they donā€™t. What can I do?

AFAIK, this can happen when the value of the date or date/time key in Source mode wasnā€™t written following the ISO8601 format (as itā€™s the only format allowed for date and date/time types of keys in Properties) and Properties canā€™t parse the value of the key correctly :blush: ā€¦

I could still be wrong though :innocent: ā€¦ But reading your post made me think about this similar issue here: {{date}} not returning today's date in templates - #5 by Pch

If anyoneā€™s interested, I finally managed to get the ISO date format working on Linux, although I might have broken a few things along the way. Using a GNOME Desktop over Linux Mint.

First, you have to set your ā€˜LANGUAGE=en_dkā€™ in the exec arguments inside the obsidian.desktop file. This works for non-English languages with a date format similiar to ISO i.e Korean or Japanese, but Obsidian seems to automatically funnel all non US English locales into using ā€˜en_gbā€™. Looking at the value of the ā€˜navigator.languagesā€™ array in the developer console, which is ordered by priority, ā€˜en_gbā€™ always ranks first, followed by the regional English locale in use, and then just ā€˜enā€™. First spent ages trying to change my system locale to get Obsidian to recognise it, then went down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out where the default Electron pipeline gets locale data from on Linux and how it orders this array and finally figured hey, if ā€˜en_gbā€™ didnā€™t exist anymore then things would be a lot easier.

Essentially, I manually unpacked the Obsidian AppImage using the ā€˜ā€“appimage-extractā€™ argument, went into the locales folder inside, and deleted both ā€˜en_gb.pakā€™ and ā€˜en_us.pakā€™ to be safe. Then, I turned it back into an AppImage using a helper tool called ā€˜appimagetoolā€™, and ran this new AppImage with the ā€˜en_dkā€™ exec argument again, and it ACTUALLY WORKED. I canā€™t seem to open up the developer tools window anymore and might have broken other things but IT WORKS. All dates in the property view use the ISO format correctly as per ā€˜en_dkā€™.

For context, my first time using Linux was yesterday and this took me way too long to figure out but it was bothering me too much and I wasnā€™t able to actually work properly in my vault until I fixed it. I also have absolutely no clue how javascript or electron or any of these things work and largely googled my way through most of it. If anyone with a slightly better understanding of things is willing to figure out why this worked, and why the developer tools menu wonā€™t open any more, there might be a more elegant solution here.