Desktop: Datetime not displayed for commits (relative date is limited in helpfulness)

Created on 13 Feb 2018 · 3Comments · Source: desktop/desktop

Description

Having the datetime of the commit in the History is really helpful, but in recent versions, it only shows the relative time, and it's in the left pane, which gets truncated if the user's name is long. It would be incredibly helpful to have the datetime shown in the main window with the commit ("December 17th 2017 at 3:11pm") rather than in the history pane as a relative date ("a week ago", "4 minutes ago", etc).

Version

GitHub Desktop version: 1.0.13

OS version: 10.13.3 (17D47)

Steps to Reproduce

No specific steps - just a general feature request

Source

spencer-microsoft

👍1

All 3 comments

Thanks for taking the time to open an issue! 🙇

I can definitely see how knowing the exact date and time a commit was created could be useful 👍

iAmWillShepherd on 14 Feb 2018

@spencer-microsoft thanks for the feedback.

For reference, the full timestamp is available by hovering on the tooltip in the history panel:

We're always striving to be consistent with GitHub The Website, and I think we've overlooked the fact that they also have the relative time in the commit details (and the tooltip shows the absolute time):

I think we should do the same thing in the commit details in Desktop:

We have a component for rendering relative time already, and the commit authors are defined here, if someone is interested in adding in support:

https://github.com/desktop/desktop/blob/458a427b012fe4c6465852905b745fe921221c69/app/src/ui/history/commit-summary.tsx#L296-L305

shiftkey on 14 Feb 2018

👍1

Thanks for taking the time to contribute @spencer-microsoft!

Using relative time stamps is a conscious design decision. As @shiftkey pointed out you can get to the exact date by hovering. Relative times are time zone independent, quite compact and doesn't require regional formatting (which is troublesome for us at the moment, see https://github.com/desktop/desktop/pull/1257#issuecomment-296147325

I don't foresee us changing this any time soon so I'm going to close this issue out but we'd welcome a new issue to discuss whether also including the date in the commit details view would make sense. With the addition of co-authors and the redesigned commit list items in the history tab we should revisit that.

cc @donokuda