Custom date & time format in the Unity tray
A nice thing about Linux in general is how you can tweak different settings to your liking. For example, let’s say that you don’t like the default date and time layout in the Unity tray, and you want to change it to look like this:
It’s not too difficult to do. You do need to wrestle with, what is probably the worst designed configuration tool I’ve ever used – dconf-editor!
To change the format, do the following:
Open the dash by clicking on the Ubuntu icon.
Type:
dconf-editor
When you’ve opened it, navigate to: com -> canonical -> indicator -> datetime
Then change the time-format dropdown to custom
Change the custom-time-format string to an strtfime format. You can read up about the different formats here. In the case of the above example, the format reads:
%a %e %b %k:%M
The changes should update immediately. If, like me, you have problems clicking on things in dconf-editor, then the only solution I’ve found is to make the dconf-editor window span more than one workspace, like so:
