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Comment by young_unixer | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related: I hate GNOME's approach at configuring formats.

In their format settings, you have to pick a country and that determines the format of dates, time, numbers, and the unit system.

Of all the countries, none of them has the sane choice for all of the fields, namely: ISO 8601 for dates and times with 24h (no AM/PM), metric system (or SI, whatever), and dot as decimal separator.

You can have sane dates, but then you have AM/PM in the clock. You can have 24h clock, but then you have a comma as decimal separator, etc.

Can we add a country "Saneland" with the sensible options for all fields? cause that's where I want to be from. Saneland: the imaginary place where we use reasonable standards and things work.

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I don't use GNOME, so I can't say exactly how it configures those formats, but from the rest of the discussion it seems to just set the locale, probably via LC_ALL. But you can set the various settings individually.

Sane Linux Locale settings

    LANG="en_US.UTF-8"  
    LANGUAGE="en_US"  
    LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"  
    LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"  
    LC_TIME="en_CA.UTF-8"  
    LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"  
    LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"  
    LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"  
    LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"  
    LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"  
    LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"  
    LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"  
    LC_MEASUREMENT="en_DK.UTF-8"  
    LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"  
    LC_ALL=

On my Debian system (KDE) that works for what you asked for. LC_MEASUREMENT="en_DK.UTF-8" sets SI units, LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" sets dot as decimal separator, and LC_TIME="en_CA.UTF-8" sets ISO 8601 dates and times with 24H format. LC_ALL being left undefined is important, it will override the rest.

The process for updating your locales will vary depending on your distro. But even if GNOME doesn't allow it you should be able to use the terminal.

This is one of my biggest gripes with GNOME, along with the incredibly stupid lack of thumbnails in the file browser.

And the way if forces you into a full-blown file search when you start typing letters and are just looking for files with that prefix...

I open a new terminal and tab my way to the file I want because it's quicker and less mentally-demanding than solving Gnome's UI puzzles. At least I used to until I had enough and switched to a different file manager.

That still hasn't been fixed? It's been so long it's become an old meme at this point. People still mock Linux for it...

Probably those are from the locales package?

en-dk is the best one, it is Europe standard english which I think fits all your requirements for Saneland.

en-se is slightly closer, as it has an ISO 8601 date, but like en-dk it still has a comma decimal separator, and the clock has a dot separator (13.49).

An artificial en-xi or similar is probably best: take en-ie, and just change the short date format.

en-dk has ISO 8601 though you're right it uses the comma.

https://github.com/lattera/glibc/blob/master/localedata/loca...

That reflects (supposedly) the official standard, but even on government forms DD-MM-YYYY or DD.MM.YYYY is used. I have never seen the ISO format used outside computer systems, unlike in Sweden where it's commonplace.

It's inconsistent with da_DK, which uses DD-MM-YYYY.

But there's already the decimal separator bug (writing English? dot, writing Danish? comma).

  % en_DK is used outside Denmark, as some sort of generic continental
  % European English locale.

And that's the nasty hack -- this should be defined in en_EU or similar.

Right, en_DK has almost nothing to do with Denmark, instead it's basically the imaginary Saneland the top poster asked for.

I agree en_EU would make more sense, maybe somebody should submit a patch to glibc and in a decade it'll be safe to switch.

You can mix and match. Unset LC_ALL, and set the following: LC_MEASUREMENT="en_DK.UTF-8" sets SI units, LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" sets dot as decimal separator, and LC_TIME="en_CA.UTF-8" sets ISO 8601 dates and times with 24H format.

But there should definitely be a saneland locale. "en_SANE.UTF-8".

XFCE allows you to set a strftime string for date format.

I'm fairly certain that GNOME2 used to as well.

Can we petition the government of Null Island (Lat 0, Long 0) to adopt the SaneLand defaults?

+1 for a new locale, equivalent to C but with UTF-8, ISO DATE, ISO paper, ...

Also, Android had until version 5 an option to force ISO date/time format, but it was removed for some reason?

Salesforce does the same thing so I tell it I’m Latvia. It kinda works until it doesn’t.

The country should be called Esperantonia

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