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date 9.May.2021

■ Customize date and time formatting for your files


Some people like months before days in their dates, others prefer the natural day-month-year order. Others still cannot be bothered with time cluttering their file dates. xplorer² internally uses nanosecond accurate dates for file synchronization, sorting and backup, but when it comes to presentation, the user is in control. By default file dates are formatted according to the short date system settings, which you can change from control panel. Changing the system dates will affect how they are displayed in all programs, including windows explorer and xplorer².

The further away in the past a file was created or modified, the less interesting its exact details. This is the idea behind friendly dates, a xplorer² feature that bunches files in date groups like modified "last hour", "yesterday", "last month" or "long ago". If you don't care to see exact dates and times, you can turn on these friendly dates using Tools > Options menu. If this mode hides too much information for your liking, you can use the extra friendly mode (available through Tools > Advanced options menu), which is guaranteed to show 1-day accurate date information for all files, as well as show recently changed files by their age (XX minutes or YY days ago), as in this picture:

file date format customizations

If you don't care for friendly and file age formating, untick "friendly dates" option. Then you can change the way xplorer² stock date columns (modified, created) are shown using custom date and time descriptor strings in Advanced options. The last column in the pic above was created with these format strings:

date: dd MMMM yyyy
time: (a single space → no time shown!)

As you can probably guess, dd stands for day, MMMM for month (long name) and yyyy for 4-digit year (e.g. 10 April 2021). To put the month first you would type something like   MM dd yy. You can add spaces or dashes (-) or slashes or whatever else you like to separate date parts. You can read all the available day month and year format strings here

Notice the trick we used to hide the time altogether, setting the time format string to a single space! (instead of time information an empty space is shown). Still you have other options e.g. HH:mm would just show hours and minutes, skipping seconds.

And remember: today is what tomorrow was yesterday! :)

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