Show the date in Natty’s Unity December 13, 2010

By default in Unity on Natty the clock only shows the time but doesn’t provide a GUI method to display the date. Since I never seem to know the date, and only sometimes the day, I like to have my clock display these to me. This is bug #601974. The quick fix:

$ gsettings set org.ayatana.indicator.datetime show-date true
$ gsettings set org.ayatana.indicator.datetime show-day true

Since this was my first foray into gsettings, I figured I’d also post how I figured this out. First I looked at the output of:

$ gsettings help


Then I drilled down until I found what I needed:

$ gsettings list-schemas|grep datetime
org.ayatana.indicator.datetime
$ gsettings list-keys org.ayatana.indicator.datetime
custom-time-format
show-date
show-day
show-seconds
time-format
$ gsettings get org.ayatana.indicator.datetime show-date
false
$ gsettings set org.ayatana.indicator.datetime show-date true
$ gsettings get org.ayatana.indicator.datetime show-date
true


I filed bug #689722 to request exposing this via the GUI.

Update: dconf-editor from dconf-tools can be used to edit gsettings in a graphical way (like gconf-editor for gconf). Thanks to mdeslaur for pointing this out! :)

Update: The gsettings path moved to /com/canonical/indicator/datetime in recent indicator-datetime versions. See bug #717318 for details.