Add the ability to change the display format of the date, as well as record the time of the task

[ivanmood0]

Thanks for the great extension, but I would like to be able to change the display format of the date, as well as record the time, not just the date of the completed task as in the screenshot below.

It would be great to have the appropriate items in the plugin settings menu.

[schemar]

Thank you for the idea @ivanmood0!

Changing the date format is being worked on right now: #384
Adding the time is something to consider, but I am not sure I will be able to add it.

[ivanmood0]

Thank you for the idea @ivanmood0!

Changing the date format is being worked on right now: #384 Adding the time is something to consider, but I am not sure I will be able to add it.

Got it , thanks for the reply.

[zzzgithubzzz]

Hi @schemar Please update the status on the ability to use custom date format option? Currently, the plugin supports only 1 format.

[claremacrae]

Hi @zzzgithubzzz It is not currently being worked on. It will be worked on at some point, but it is not possible to give a schedule.

[zzzgithubzzz]

Thank you for the quick reply 🙏

[pm64]

Due time (in addition to date) seems like a useful data point, and is supported by platforms like Todoist. @schemar, would you mind expanding on the obstacle(s) you'd anticipate in implementing support for due times?

[claremacrae]

would you mind expanding on the obstacle(s) you'd anticipate in implementing support for due times?

Sure. No pun intended, but the difficulty is mainly time! There are a couple of volunteers doing much of the work on the project - and there are a lot of existing requests from users.

Ones like this, that do something for which the code was not originally designed, are more time-consuming, as they require care and thought to make sure they don't break existing features for existing users.

There is a starting point for customising date formats here: #384 - but the code has changed a lot since that was written.

So it would need a volunteer to step forward who is an experienced developer, and is willing to spend the time making the safe change, carefully.

[pm64]

Thank you @claremacrae for your thoughtful response.

[pcause]

I'd like to see this as well, but have a work around made possible by some recent changes. I start my tasks as follows:

= [ ] HH:MM #task description .....

I then use this query

not done
happens before tomorrow
sort by description

task with no time are last, but tasks with a time appear in time order

[claremacrae]

Nice. Thank you for writing it up!

[danielskowronski]

I know it's an old topic, but it's a major blocker for me for moving from NotePlan 3 back to Obsidian.

Currently, I use completion time extensively as a semi-automated journal - just to keep track when a task was done, scoped to the daily note (it saves a lot of time to get time auto-inserted when marking a task as completed). However, there are plenty of benefits for automation later on. Not to mention opening to people who don't like the best date format ever ;)

@claremacrae, I had a quick look at the code and past PR - do I get it right that the problem is that the plugin deals with dates and not DateTimes and that means any area in code that utilizes that property would have to be changed (also to support things like due date without specifying exact time)?

The issue seems to fall into one of those that do not have one correct solution, especially when dealing with various date/time formats that are not reliably identifiable only by their value (like day-month vs month-day or risk of losing AM/PM indicator in favour of implicit 24-hour format). If user were allowed to choose DateTime format, there would need to be a tool to convert all existing uses, which would be a nightmare.

To make matters worse, if some semi-universal format like UNIX timestamp was chosen, then we'd have issue with timezones and DST (not to mention the non-human friendly nature of such timestamp - what makes Obsidian great tool is the ability to read and write notes as plain Markdown text manually).

I see one half-measure that could solve the problem for me - decouple Time from Date and have it as a separate "emoji" field (and keep it 24-hours HH:mm). This would potentially limit the scope of data usability to a specific note. On the other hand, there could be a natural need to add similar time field for various extra states, like to record when tasks was started and calculate the amount spent from that - something that would probably warrant even more code reorganization not to be hardcoded solution for few people. That solution could be a separate plugin, but I'd prefer to avoid compatibility issues, as I find Tasks to be useful in the current state.

As such, I feel like whoever would like to implement this feature set would need to be or become an active maintainer of the entire plugin, as there would be a need for major decisions that affect the entire code. I'd be happy to help, but I can't make any guaranties about my time in a long run :|

[claremacrae]

Sorry @danielskowronski, I am swamped with stuff to do, and don't have time to reply in detail to your message in the immediately foreseeable future.

From your comments above, and looking at your blog, I would be very interested in discussing with you the possibility of your contributing on this feature.

Definitely don't start working on it without a discussion though. The volume of work on this project now is such that I have changed the PR template to say that we reserve the right to close PRs that have not been discussed in advance, because they generally require too much work to shepherd through.

If you are interested in a chat about how this might work, feel free to email the address in my profile here, and we can try and find a time to chat.