Option to always display commit date and time in History list

[HughWarrington]

The feature request

Currently, the History panel shows commit dates in an approximate, prose description, like "yesterday" or "14 months ago".

The actual commit date/time can be found by hovering the mouse over the approximate description.

This makes certain kinds of task very slow: for example, the task I have just been trying to solve in a busy repository: 'find the first commit made on October 10th 2022'. I have to do some kind of binary chop hovering the mouse over many of the approximate descriptions.

In fact, the approximate date/time descriptions are never useful to me. I'm speculating that they exist to help people who work in a context where one developer might say "check that commit I made two days ago". But I work on a team with members in many timezones, so there is no common point of reference for what "yesterday" etc means.

I would like an option to always display the full commit date and time in the History panel, instead of the approximate textual description.

I think there is some support for this in the comments on #5395.

Proposed solution

Add an option to always display commit date and time in the History list.

Or simpler, just always show the full date/time in this view, and get rid of the approximate description entirely. But I suppose since the decision was made to show the date/time in its current 'approximate' form, the authors might have established that some people prefer it this way.

Additional context

No response

[chrisdlee1]

The full date would be much preferred for myself as well. Vague terms contain less information than the actual date and uses as much space or more, I don't see the point.

[steveward]

Thanks for the issue @HughWarrington. In the interest of keeping our issue list consolidated I'm going to add this to #17469, which is an existing issue tracking this request.

[HughWarrington]

Thanks for the issue @HughWarrington. In the interest of keeping our issue list consolidated I'm going to add this to #14611, which is an existing issue tracking this request.

Hi @steveward, I think you might have put in the wrong ticket number, as that looks like an unrelated issue?

[steveward]

Apologies, #14611 is the correct one.

[HughWarrington]

OK, that other ticket requests four or five different things, including one change that was already put forward, implemented but rejected at the PR stage (14754). Seems to me this ticket is smaller, more focused, doesn't contain a rejected idea, and therefore should be preferred.

[aicam]

Any update on this feature?

[chodorowicz]

Finding a PR from a specific date is quite cumbersome with those vague dates. 😬

[tksuoran]

"committed 2 weeks ago" is the most useless thing in github. The exact date is what I need. Please fix. Thanks.

[Devanshjain2110]

git show --no-patch --format=%ci {commit}

This command should help for someone who needs this urgently.

P.S : - I would also appreciate the above feature

[hmChris]

please please please stop with last week, 2 weeks ago, etc. Use the date!

[avgojzack]

git show --no-patch --format=%ci {commit} only works for commits, not all the various other dates shown on Github (PR approval, merge, etc)

[ratnikov]

I ran into this, but seems like hovering over the "2 weeks ago" gives you the actual date:

Hopefully that work around is good enough (it's good enough for me).

[steelbytes]

come on ... it's been [insert unspecified amount of time here] that this has been driving me nuts.

[steelbytes]

although us coders are trying to do precise work, github doesn't want to give us precise tools. :face_palm:

[chandrapol]

Instead of 5 weeks ago, I would prefer exact date.

[alikazi-sonder]

I am regretting moving from Bitbucket to Github. Github is missing so many basic features like accurate date and time formats, automatic team allocation when creating Pull Request, automatic list of commits when creating Pull Request, authentication for third party access to repo is such a pain and so on. Horrible.

[mgussekloo]

I would really like exact dates in history as well.

[harrymattison]

please

[dutchdata]

seriously

[ElryGH]

Pathetic

[starkers]

so frustrated I can't just see when things happened, even just on the website..

[attheshow]

Just adding a +1 for this request. 😊🏅

[tluijken]

So, one of the actions/cache calls has failed us for a few days. Could you let me know if we did something in our repository which caused it, or a commit on the actions repo? But I'm not getting any further than version 4.1.2 was created somewhere last week, making it very hard to have a timeline of events leading up to this.

[sadawespj]

Same here!!! If I could just hover over and see the exact timestamp, it would save me trouble!

[MuhammadSYahyaS]

From business perspective, this feature is really needed for accurate reporting of work history. Github should show exact date by default, or at least give us the option.

[eqperes]

Adding to the number of people that find this essential

[kaktooss]

I want to understand when the code was delivered to production, but i see "Released last week" which gives me a window of 7 days to guess. Could we please have a way to know when exactly that happened, i do not know - setting to display a date instead, pop-up window, hover tooltip, anything, please!

[ratnikov]

I want to understand when the code was delivered to production, but i see "Released last week" which gives me a window of 7 days to guess.

Have you tried hovering over it? For me it renders the time stamp. (I still wish it renders it immediately, but it's clear that GitHub is not very interested in our opinion at this point).

[JosephDevlin]

Can we please get some traction on this surely very simple change. Both views have use but we need both.

[hiraditya]

the issue is closed but the issue is still there. hovering over all the comments is annoying. Ideally, I'd like to have a setting that allows me to see the exact date all the time. A typical use case for me is when re-requesting feedback. In the repo I contribute to it is typical to wait for a week before pinging the reviewers on a PR. It quickly becomes frustrating to hover over the comments to find out the exact date.

[attheshow]

You're right about this issue being closed for some reason. I noticed that one of the other cross-linked issue that's essentially the same request is also tagged as "not planned." Maybe @steveward who closed the issue might be able to comment as to why? 🙏