752337 - 24-hour time does not appear possible in Thunderbird

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 656502

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[Mark Holmquist]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0
Build ID: 20120417165043

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open Thunderbird
2. Notice the AM/PM stamps on each message, get annoyed
3. Scroll down
4. Notice the mm/dd/yyyy date format, get more annoyed
5. Look in preferences, config editor, and various environment variables for a solution


Actual results:

Nothing. Though I want my date and time to appear in ISO formats, Thunderbird does not seem to have this option.


Expected results:

I would settle for an about:config setting that I could change to set the date format myself, but probably having a setting in preferences would be helpful.

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

It respects the environment settings. Try
export LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF-8

Comment 2

[rsx11m]

On Linux, this depends on the LC_ALL and LC_TIME environment settings, see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Date_display_format for details.

There is currently no way to explicitly set the date and time formats in Thunderbird itself by means of a preference setting.

Comment 3

[Joe Sabash [:JoeS1]]

On winxp this can be set in control panel.
Go to Control Panel > Regional and Language Options, and click the Customize button next to the drop-down box. Go to the Time tab, and change the time format to H:mm:ss.
I feel a lot more comfortable with 24hr time as well.

Comment 4

[Mark Holmquist]

These are some super-cool tricks and all, but I don't want to have to switch my locale settings to change the time format--most programs will allow me to change it *even though* I come from an asswards-back country that repeats time cycles twice a day. Besides, command-line hacks aren't terribly user-friendly....my limited understanding of the situation is that LC_TIME is used to fetch a strftime() format, which is then used to output the proper thing. Why not offer the ability to change the format string?

Comment 5

[rsx11m]

An enhancement request for adding date/time-formatting options has already been filed but didn't get much attention so far. I'll dupe your bug report against it and confirm that request, as in general it appears to be a good idea.