I prefer to always see dates in yyyy-mm-dd format. Currently, some dates are “Today”, or “3 days from now” kind of thing. It would be nice to have a settings option that allows the user to always see the actual date in a selection of formats.
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A workaround in the meantime for this, as mentioned by another user is to use a hashtag such as #YYMMDD.
I find the current Thu, March 2nd 2017 date format a little long for mobile use, so tend to use the #YYMMDD tag format too. A nice pro feature might be customizable date display formats, something like http://userguide.icu-project.org/formatparse/datetime
Yes, that’s what we plan to do as well! The exact format probably won’t be the same, but we will document the syntax carefully when we release it.
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Update: there is now a Pro settings for this! It’s under Settings - Preferences - Date. More info on the format: http://help.dynalist.io/preferences/#date-display-format
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Hi Erica, thanks for the custom date formatting. I saw that it will take a bit to migrate to mobile. Will the custom format also eventually appear in search across documents? The custom format shows up in individual documents just fine. Searching across documents for say “within:4w” and the standard date formatting still appears in search results on the web. Use case is a bookmark showing next 4 weeks of upcoming dated items across projects. Thanks!
Yes, they will appear in mobile soon too.
Do you mean Search Everywhere on mobile or Search Everywhere in general? I mean this custom format should already be applied in Search Everywhere on desktop/web, if not that’s a bug.
I tried playing with the custom date formats and noticed a small problem.
The default date format doesn’t show the time if it’s not set. But with the custom date format you have to either show the time for all dates or never show it at all.
One more feature that would be really cool would be to format dates differently according to how far from today they are. For example, I’d like to see
- “Sa 25” for a date this month
- “Tu 3 Apr” for a date another month this year
- “Mo 1 Jan 2018” for dates another year
I mostly look at dates that are close by and having them short would be really nice.
Maybe there’s a way to do this with a userscript?
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I’d like to be able to customize date formats by “distance from now()” as well — that’d be nuts. But it’d also be a ridiculous interface-design challenge to make that intuitive to customize. Alternatively, maybe just a customizable list of date formats that can be easily toggled globally. So I can look in “Relative Mode” where all dates become “Today”, “In two days” or “Three weeks ago”; or I can switch to “Absolute” mode and they become “Feb 27”, “Feb 29”, or “Feb 14”; or I could add a combo format: “Today (Feb 27)”, “In two days (Feb 29)”, and so on. And just toggle depending on what I’m looking at and how I’m thinking about time at the moment.
I did a similar request some time ago, but didn’t get a reply from them. What I’m doing now is using Google’s excel sheet create a date formula (searched on Google, which allow you display days from today as #y #m #d), and display the result as picture than link to Dynalist.
Sorry about that! And thanks for sharing 
Yeah, that sounds hard to make intuitive indeed.
My concern is that it would bloat the UI if it can be easily toggled globally. If it’s buried in settings, it’s not easy to toggle. Or via a shortcut?
No problem, I know you guys are very busy. But since we talking about it again, my idea is in the calendar menu add a bottom between time and done (time have unnecessary large box), or just add a switch in the setting ( I rarely care about exact date, usually just about how many days between the day I put in and today). Thanks.
I see.
What would the button between “Time” and “Done” be, switching between relative and absolute mode?
Yes and Please 
Maybe open a new quick feature request on this? Since the original request was already implemented.
I did. The topic is call “Display how many days”. I don’t want to bump it up again for no good reason, but I did update with my suggestion in that topic.
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