Add option for 24-hour clock

[Ricaz]

• I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates

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It would be nice to have the option to display 24-hour timestamps for all the non-US/UK users.

[Netpilgrim]

While not the most important issue by far am/pm is a pain for everyone used to 24-hour clock.
More generally (and this applies to so many applications out there):
If your software displays date or time information anywhere, please add a setting where the user can enter a format string. Do not just rely on the system locale. If you absolutely have to hard-code a format, please use ISO 8601.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[briped]

While I don't see this as a solution, I do see it as a work around until Signal adds an GUI option for the same.
Edit the ephemeral.json file located in your %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Signal folder.

Change:

"localeOverride": null

to your preferred locale. In my case it would be en-DK (for English language and Danish formatting):

"localeOverride": "en-DK"

Afterwards Signal shows the timestamp as I expect them to be shown.

I have not tested this approach on my Ubuntu box, but I would imagine a similar approach is possible on there as well.

[ReinhardC]

Thanks, great tip. For me it didn't work immediately because I have "minimize to tray" on, but a proper restart of the app applied the new setting. I hope they add a GUI setting some day.

[jamiebuilds-signal]

@briped The manual edit you're doing to ephemeral.json is the same as changing the Language setting in Settings > Appearance > Language.

[briped]

@briped The manual edit you're doing to ephemeral.json is the same as changing the Language setting in Settings > Appearance > Language.

Ah. That option is grayed out, which lead me to believe that it couldn't be changed.

I see that it can in fact be clicked, however, looking over the available languages, it is only possible to change the (display)language and not the locale/formatting here.

From reading the various reports/comments, and my own experience, what we are after is having English (US) Display Language, but our local formatting/locale (i.e. en-DK in my case, or en-GB for UK English etc.), which is how we've actually configured the system (Windows), and therefore expects signal to follow those settings, especially considering that it actually shows "System Language", thereby giving me (us) the impression that Signal reads both the display language and formatting locale from the system settings.

[chpio]

My system is configured as en-DE (using gnome, version 45.3 at the time of writing). Signal just ignores that and shows the weird am/pm time format

[jamiebuilds-signal]

@chpio Could I get debuglogs from you? https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318591-Debug-Logs-and-Crash-Reports