[MlMt] Show dates including day-of-week?

[Oliver Sturm]

Hi Henry,

Many thanks for your reply. I had so far not used an experimental version because I didn't feel that I had a reason to. However, now I tried to upgrade to the latest experimental and I found that the date display logic had changed a bit compared to my old version.

In my old version, the date format did not seem to be related to the system setting in a few tests I ran, but I may have been mistaken because I had not discovered that the format changes based on column width. In the new version, the format is clearly related.

Here are my findings, in case they’re useful to others:

- Using a system setting selectable in the dialog, the `AppleICUDateFormatStrings` are configured to a list of options varying in length between 1 and 4 (as far as I’ve seen).

- At least three of these format strings are apparently used by MailMate depending on the column width, but if the list only contains one then MM pulls extra ones out of thin air… or, more likely, from a source I don’t know.

- By setting at least one format string to a custom format including a short DOW placeholder, I can get close to my intended result: `defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleICUDateFormatStrings -dict-add 1 'yy-MM-dd EEEEEE'`

- (Side note, the existence of the `AppleICUDateFormatStrings` list seems to be a great secret that is undocumented by Apple and only surfaces in Stackoverflow replies, sources unknown.)

- (Second side note, Apple docs have me click endlessly in circles attempting to find a list of valid placeholders. They indicate somewhere that Unicode Technical Standard #35 is what they use, but they don’t link to it. You can find it [at this URL](https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-31/tr35-dates.html#Date_Field_Symbol_Table) if you’re curious.)

- I found that my custom format, being alone in the string list, was extremely close to the next one added from an unknown source, so that a column width of plus/minus one pixel resulted in the wrong format being used. So I added the same format multiple times:

```
➜  defaults read NSGlobalDomain AppleICUDateFormatStrings
{
    1 = "yy-MM-dd EEEEEE";
    2 = "yy-MM-dd EEEEEE";
    3 = "yy-MM-dd EEEEEE";
}
```

- Now the remaining problem was only that the display seemed very untidy because of the proportional width font used for the view. I changed the font to my preferred Pragmata Pro Mono Liga, and that’s fine for me although it applies to all columns at once. I have one issue remaining, which is that the selectable font sizes are only 14 and 18, while I think 16 would be fantastic — I expect I might find a settings file somewhere so I can select the right size manually.

- The one issue I foresee now is that the system setting I used may turn out to be suboptimal in some other scenario. For this reason I think it would be great if MM had its own config somewhere that could be used independently of the system setting. But for now I’m happy to leave it as is and see how it goes.

Cheers
Oli





On 3 Dec 2024, at 20:31, Henry Seiden wrote:

> Hi Oli,
>
> Don’t know if Benny, our Developer has read this yet (he’s usually on this board as well), but you may want to leave Feedback for him at his Feedback page, just to be sure he gets product improvement suggestions like this. I took the liberty of [copying this one to him for you](mailto:mm-feedback at freron.com). You may want to  note  it for the future.
>
> NB, the layouts have not changed since 5937 on this date layout, to my knowledge, but the current “Experimental Version” is v6065. You will note that the Received Date layout changes format with the space allocated for it in the message window.
>
> That’s a unique feature to MM at last comparing with Mail.app’s layout options. I can’t speak for all the others out there though.
>
> Respectfully,
>
> Henry Seiden
> - -
> Techworks Pro Co.
> E: info<at>techworkspro<dot>com
> W: http://techworkspro.com
>
> On 3 Dec 2024, at 10:34, Oliver Sturm via mailmate wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm wondering if it's possible to include the day of the week in the dates displayed specifically in the "Date Received" column of the message overview and also in the header display for an individual selected message. I checked all the documentation and I tried to make changes to the system settings, but it appears that the formats used in MailMate are independent and I can't set them anywhere.
>>
>> I’d like to have “Tu 26 Nov 2024”, for instance — just a short indicator of the day oof the week.
>>
>> I’m using MailMate Version 1.14 (5937). Any ideas?
>>
>> Thanks
>> Oli
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> mailmate mailing list
>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
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