+1 please. with an institutional computer, it’s pretty challenging to change OS settings, and even when I can, there are other knock-on effects
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Not being able to change the date format has bothered me for a long time. I might even have contributed to this thread but there’s so many posts that the forum makes it hard to find them. Or maybe it was Discord, it’s been a while since I last mentioned it but it bothers me literally every day.
There are dedicated Windows date format and Linux date format issue threads, with Mac users leaving posts confirming problems in the replies as well.
There’s people posting registry hacks to try to work around it. Suggestions for setting various environment variables and command line arguments that might give the user control.
Honestly, trying to fix the underlying issue seems like it isn’t going to happen, due to whatever is going in in Electron-land.
Overriding it with a user-defined value is a feature that people are requesting regardless.
Seems like it would be a good solution for all of the people having locale issues too.
8 Likes
Best solution I have found so far: LANG=sv obsidian for ISO 8601 format.
Still a dirty hack with potential side effects, not sure if there is a way to get english version of swedish date to work (en_SE doesn’t work). We need an option to set date format like %YYYY-%MM-%DD template string.
1 Like
Doubling down on this.
We should really have the better way of having date formats customizable and independent of the OS.
What would be the point of supporting the formats from Moment.js as stated in the templates core plugin, if the date property ignores anything but the OS settings?
3 Likes
Win 10, DD/MM/YYYY in format settings and Obsidian is still not using the device’s formatting
+1 This is crazy that this hasn’t been implemented yet, especially with the introduction of Bases. Sorting by dates is an absolute nightmare at current.
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Same problem for me (Germany, Windows 11 24H2 Build 26100.6584).
I found a fix (at least it works here):
Setting Windows > Settings > Time & language > Language & region > Regional format to “German (Germany)” shows everything in US format like discussed in this thread.
Setting this to “Recommended” and then changing all the details so that it looks like a german format (decimal symbol, digit grouping symbol, measurement system, currency symbol, currency formats, decimal symbol (currency), digit grouping symbol (currency), first day of week, short date, short time, long time, long date) and then restarting Obsidian shows it in ISO format now (as my set short date is).
This is the setting I’m talking about:
The detailled options are just below:
Still would very much prefer having the ability to set this in Obsidian itself, though.
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Adding my +1 to this, with a need for the formatting in YYYY-MM-DD format on Linux.
I’ve gone through everything in this thread and everything I was able to find online about updating my languages, to the point where I’ve not only updated my language file at /usr/share/i18n/locales/en_US, I’ve created a new language file entirely and set my system to it. Everything else on my system shows in the expected YYYY-MM-DD format, except for Obsidian, which is still on the unwanted MM/DD/YYYY format.
My last hope was setting a flatpak override like rawsidian mentioned, but that didn’t work (I didn’t expect it to, though, since I had already updated the en_US.UTF8 file).
And yes, I’ve rebooted after every attempted change. I’m pretty sure my computer has been rebooted more in the last few days trying to get this to work than it has the entire rest of this year. Please, let us use a user-defined date format!
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still no solution as the system setting (on mac) is not applied inside Obsidian
I’d like to know if people affirming it works ever tested it
Like the images below? For me, it works, so long as I quit and restart Obsidian after changing the date format in system settings. (Or have a misunderstood?)
I did and still do: I’ve had Properties displaying dates/times like I want them to (ISO8601) since I open this FR on Mac 
…
The only thing that changed for me is that when I upgraded my Mac, I decided to use it in English and with my Mac set that way, Properties still follow, to this day, the format set for the date in my Mac’s settings…
So, this could be relevant, maybe 
?
In other words: Obsidian’s might not pick your the date format set on your Mac if your whole Mac isn’t set to English 
(which wasn’t the case before because you could tweak the “Advanced settings” of the date format on your Mac… but that disappeared).
I really feel like discussing OS-specific fixes (whilst I’m happy that it’s working on your machine) is entirely irrelevant from the goal of this FR. Lets not beat about the bush, this is a big missing feature that really should be implemented as a necessity.
With the introduction and push of Obsidian bases, dates should have been refactored. It’s disappointing there haven’t been any thoughts from Obsidian team despite the substantial support from the community.
Eagerly watching this thread.
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Wow! This still hasn’t been resolved. I would have assumed by now. This further reinformes my decision to not use properties in my Obsidian at all.
I do really hope there is a solution to this.
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Just so you know, my plugin Pretty properties allows you to change date format, among the other things.
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Thanks for the hint!
It has annoyed me for so long that Obsidian as the only app that I am aware of uses US dates and wrong clock format on a system with different region settings:
I can confirm that using “Recommended” as a workaround regional format and adjusting the short date fixes Obsidian visuals. Additionally, the 24 hour format for time values is finally used.
Sidenote:
I am surprised that this is degraded as a FR (and even closed for Linux) when it is not working as intended / advertised in the official documentation Properties - Obsidian Help which says the regional settings are honored when they are not 
2 Likes
I struggled with this when I first got Obsidian on my work computer (a Windows 11 Machine), and finally gave up, and created a text-based “date added” field in my templates that automatically puts in today’s date in YYYY-MM-DD format, so I don’t need to see dates in the wrong order, and I forgot about the problem, till now, when I am starting to make more use of Bases.
So now I have the correct date in the Windows task bar, and in the text format date added property:
but in the actual created time and modified time properties, it is in a horrid format with the year in the middle:
I cannot think of any reason that one would want to see dates in that format. Please, please, please, someone with that level of programming skill, make an internal Obsidian fix that lets people customize how dates look that doesn’t care what the system date format is (especially since it clearly isn’t actually following the system format for many of us).
1 Like
I’m having the same issue as others here - my system is in English but I would never intentionally use MM-DD-YYYY on it anywhere, yet that is the order Obsidian uses. It’s maddening
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t’s a live-view issue of the property:
If your switch to YAML/source-view the date should be displayed correct, only in the live-view it’s incorrect:
Live-View Property:
YAML/SOURCE VIEW:
It’s not an “issue” per se … it’s a missing feature 
.
How Properties in Live Preview displays date and date & time is currently OS dependent which doesn’t offer much customization…
Except tweaking the settings of the whole device to just display these values in Properties in Live Preview/ Reading mode according to a user preference… Hence the feature request here 
.
And as you can see, if you skim through the whole topic, depending on the actual OS of the device, some users seem to encounter further issues to display these values in Properties according to their wishes (which generally occurred on Windows and Linux, iirc).
After that, yes, all date and date & time values need to be written following the ISO8601 format if you use a YAML block in Source mode and they will be added as such if you add a date or a date time value to a key in Properties in Live Preview
Incorrect.
Obsidian is meant to use the OS specific datetime format for dates. This isn’t working and thus a feature request has been made to manually control the format in settings.
It is an issue (that hasn’t been resolved or even acknowledged) which the community has proposed a solution for by way of a feature.
Oh my god, you just saved me from the most annoying feature of Obsidian! I can’t thank you enough.