Date formats macOS Ventura

[matthias_livecode_150811 at m-r-d.de]

Hello,

Mark Clark's post 'LC Date Conversions post 2035 [OT ish]" made me play a little bit with 'the date' in LC.

I have macOS Ventura installed and noticed that the system date had a 2 digit year in LC.

So i went to the Control Pane to customize the date format. Unfortunately I had to realize that you no longer can set a user-defined date format or number format in Ventura.

Here in my German version of Ventura i could only choose between  dd.MM.yy and yyy-MM-dd. There is no way to customize
the date and number format as it was possible with previous versions of macOS.
In my case i am in need of the date format dd.MM.yyyy

I contacted the Apple support about this and it seems they even were not aware that this was changed in Ventura. They asked me to do a safe boot,
create a new user account and finally they wanted me to reinstall Ventura, which i denied, because i was sure, that this has nothing to do with a faulty installation, but with Ventura itself.

Anyway, i searched the whole evening yesterday and found a  post in the apple forums
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254316210
which has a workaround for this.

In short.

Method 1
Either edit the file /Users/matthias/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist
and add
<key>AppleICUDateFormatStrings</key>
	<dict>
		<key>1</key>
		<string>##custom date format##</string>
	</dict>

and replace ##custom date format## with you desired format. You can even add more format by increasing the <key> value

<key>AppleICUDateFormatStrings</key>
	<dict>
		<key>1</key>
		<string>##custom date format##</string>
		<key>2</key>
		<string>##custom date forma2t##</string>
	</dict>
and so on...

After saving you have to logout and login again to get the settings active.

Method 2
Another way is to use the shell. Using the shell does not need to logout and login again.

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleICUDateFormatStrings -dict-add "1" "dd.MM.yyyy"
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleICUDateFormatStrings -dict-add "2" "dd.MM.yy"
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleICUDateFormatStrings -dict-add "3" "dd MMMM y"
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleICUDateFormatStrings -dict-add "4" "EEEE, d MMMM y"


After you have set the date format using method 1 or 2, you will not see any "selected" date format in the region settins in the Control Panel, because the Control Panel does not support that anymore. The "field" is empty.
As soon as you select a date format in the Control Panel, your previous settings from method 1 or 2  are overwritten and not used anymore. In this case you have to rerun one of the above steps.

Maybe this is of help for one or the other.

Regards,
Matthias