Are you as annoyed as I am regarding the complete lack of regard for common sense shown by the Mozilla Thunderbird user interface designers? Have you spent the deep hours of many late nights weeping and tearing your hair because the abject stupidity of the so-called "Long Date Format" has cost you more con points than any of the twinks who are trying to pkill you for your grand-master-level armor?
If you answered "Yes" to the above, there may be a degree of relief in sight: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Date_display_format has (finally) some information about how to make Thunderbird - at least - behave in a bit more civilized manner - more like an application that may be willing to live within the constraints of the system, and with the desires of potential users to have a mail application that doesn't hide from them things like the date, time, source of the message, etc.
While many of you may feel - as the Mozilla Designers obviously do - that the trend towards Complete Desktop Dis-functionality - usually combined by the software designers with a concerted assault on the sanity of any unfortunates who may happen to stumble into the precisely and deviously laid psyware traps (I mean, have you seen the error message that says "You WILL NOT use the international standard date formats, you pinko commie fag - you un-American hippie filth! SCREW YOU if you think you want to use this computer as god intended, fulfilling the natural relationship between man and machine - making the world a better place for yourself and the rest of you weak, puny, carbon-based SCUM! Screw YOU if you think this machine is going to do ANYTHING you tell it to. WE are in charge now, and you days as a system operator are NUMBERED!"?) - is some sort of fiscal holy grail, I am here to assure you that there are still some of us out here who hold to the Truths we have known and discovered through tribulation and discord these many long temporal units - you're just wrong. So there.
Anyway - vituperation and contempt for panty-waist UI designers and wussy software developers aside - here is the answer:
| Preference | Applies to | Default value |
|---|---|---|
mail.ui.display.dateformat.today | Messages with today's date | 0 |
mail.ui.display.dateformat.thisweek | Messages with a date in the past seven days | 2 |
mail.ui.display.dateformat.default | Older messages | 2 |
Of course, that will do you no good at all w/o the codes:
| Value | Meaning | Example date and time |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | No date | 10:23 AM |
| 1 | Your system's long* date format | Friday, December 31 2003 10:23 AM |
| 2 | Your system's short* date format | 12/31/1999 10:23 AM |
| 3 | Year and month, separated by a slash | 1999/12 10:23 AM |
| 4 | Abbreviated day name | Fri 10:23 AM |
And finally, you should know what this is:
user_pref("mail.ui.display.dateformat.today", 2);
FtR: This is Mozilla Thunderbird v2.0.0.23 (20090817) running on heavily customized OpenSuSE 11.1 install to some kind of an HP notebook [luggable] which has not been moved or opened in months, but which has fairly good uptimes, only needing to restart when new kernels are installed, etc.
This blog post is supplied as a Mind Numbing Experience (MNE). No warranties are expressed or implied, and if you try anything you find written here, you r one sick fuck, and there's probably no help for you. Sorry. Peace out.
