How to get detailed date and time display for list view in Ubuntu 14.04 file manager
TL;DR: I fixed my problem by using Thunar instead of Nautilus.
Nautilus devs, please make time style display configurable!
What's my problem?
At some point, file time stamp display in Nautilus (aka Files) in Ubuntu started insisting on a relative time display, where depending on the file age, the time stamp will either just show time (e.g. 12:31), or just date (e.g. Jan 1), or date and year (e.g. Dec 25 2013).
Why is this a problem?
It works fine when time stamps are far enough apart:
But when there are multiple files from the same hour, there's no way to tell them apart based on time stamp in Nautilus. For example, all these files show with time stamp of Dec 24:
Personally I prefer YYYY:dd:mm HH:MM:SS, with hour in 0-24 (e.g. 2014-12-25 12:31), like --time-style long-iso in ls:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ak ak 0 2014-12-25 12:31 1.today
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ak ak 0 2014-12-24 12:32 2.yesterday
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ak ak 0 2014-11-25 12:33 3.month.ago
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ak ak 0 2013-12-25 12:33 4.year.ago
I found no quick and easy way to change the time display in Nautilus, so I installed Thunar (sudo apt-get install thunar), which makes time display easily configurable (Edit > Preferences > Display > Date > Format):
Leave a comment