Change the Bar Date and Time Format

The X11 (i3) and Wayland (sway) sessions use different bars, which are configured differently.

X11 Session (i3)

The time format (12 or 24 hour) can be specified in Settings, under System > Date & Time > Time Format. The bar picks up the change within about ten seconds.

The order of day and month follows the country of your LC_TIME locale: month first (MM/DD) for the United States, Canada, China, Japan and a few other countries, and day first (DD/MM) for all others.

The date and time formats can also be explicitly set via Xresources. To do so, override the i3xrocks.date.format2 Xresource key in ~/.config/regolith3/Xresources. The value is the format that would be passed to the date command on the command line, without the leading +. For example, the following line uses the YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm format:

i3xrocks.date.format2: %Y-%m-%d %H:%M

Then run regolith-look refresh. The bar shows the date and time like this:

While this key is set, the bar no longer follows the Time Format setting.

The most useful formats that are supported are as follows:

• %Y prints year as YYYY
• %y prints year as YY
• %m prints month as MM
• %d prints day as DD
• %H prints hours in 24 hour format
• %I prints hours in 12 hour format
• %M prints minute as mm
• %p prints AM or PM

For more details and placeholders, please look at date --help.

Wayland Session (sway)

The sway bar, i3status-rs, doesn’t read i3xrocks.date.format2 or the Time Format setting. Its date and time formats are part of its configuration file. To change them, use your own copy of that file:

1. Copy the default configuration:

   mkdir -p ~/.config/regolith3/i3status-rust
   cp /etc/regolith/i3status-rust/config.toml ~/.config/regolith3/i3status-rust/config.toml

2. In the copy, change the format of the two time blocks. By default, the date block uses %a-%d/%m/%y and the time block uses %R (24 hour hh:mm). For example, for YYYY-MM-DD and a 12 hour clock:

   ~/.config/regolith3/i3status-rust/config.toml

   [[block]]
   block = "time"
   interval = 5
   format = "\uf073 $timestamp.datetime(f:'%Y-%m-%d')"
   
   [[block]]
   block = "time"
   interval = 5
   format = "$icon $timestamp.datetime(f:'%I:%M %p')"

   On Ubuntu 22.04 and Debian, the file has a single time block with a plain format, format = "%d/%m %R"; change that one instead.

3. Tell the bar to use your copy, and reload:

   echo "wm.bar.status_config: ~/.config/regolith3/i3status-rust/config.toml" >> ~/.config/regolith3/Xresources
   regolith-look refresh

   With the example above, the bar shows the date and time like this:

   

The placeholders are the same as for date, listed above. See the time block documentation for the other options.