Digital Clock pipe delimiter removed in 6.5.0

[FGD]

Hello,

Before I post this as a bug I want to make sure it was intended. Which in a way is not that common I believe for Plasma to remove features, unless they cause issues or are deprecated. But just in case…

Before Plasma 6.5.0, there was an automated pipe delimiter inserted between the Date and Time.

Since 6.5.0, this is gone and I do not see anything in the settings to add it back.

Yes, I can trick the Custom Date format and add a “|” at the end, but that causes a slight padding to be added on one side of the pipe depending on the time format you use. The only moment it looks right is when you use a 24-Hour format AND your time is between 12:00 and 23:59.

What happened to this awesome delimiter?

Thanks

[pg-tips]

@FGD

Before I post this as a bug I want to make sure it was intended. … What happened to this awesome delimiter?

The change was intended, as the delimiter seems to have been considered rather non-awesome by other users:

A pipe (vertical line) character shows between date and time in the Digital Clock widget on the panel

In Plasma 6.3, there is a pipe character now between the date and the time in the Digital Clock widget on the panel if you set the date to show “always beside time”. The pipe seems to be a part of the clock, not the date, and it’s not there initially when the widget is added and the date is shown “always below time”. Once the setting is set to “always beside time”, the pipe appears and stays there even if the date is hidden altogether. It doesn’t matter what font or font type and size are sele…

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Bug ticket:

499989 – Ability to disable inline divider on digital clock

The comment on the commit for the code change says:

This change was unnecessary; you can already manually add it via the | character in the custom date option, if you really want this.

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@FGD

Yes, I can trick the Custom Date format and add a “|” at the end, but that causes a slight padding to be added on one side of the pipe depending on the time format you use.

You might want to raise that padding as a new issue.

[FGD]

Excellent, thank you very much! I missed those posts I guess.

[FGD]

I create an issue to see what valid alternative would be proposed.

511155 – Digital Clock manual inline pipe divider adds unwanted padding

[skyfishgoo]

the will they wont they drama over this “|” thing is giving me giggles.

looks in plasma 5

[Denis_Yurin]

I’ll also be affected by this “upgrade”. I’ve always used this delimiter, and manually adding a “|” in the data format doesn’t replace it! It was nice and clean - why on earth did someone decide to get rid of it?

[FGD]

Hi @Denis_Yurin I’m hoping you can chime in or at least up vote the issue I opened and referenced in my previous post. Thanks in advance.

[boredkollie]

In my opinion getting rid of the default pipe allows users to use a custom one.
I’m using this ona as an example:

[FGD]

In fact I am not questioning the removal of the pipe per se, you can absolutely use any divider. What I am questioning is the reappearance of the old way the digital clock works.

By default the clock reserves for itself a single SPACE in place of the left digit of a double-digit hour format, so when it’s a single digit hour, there is an extra space between the divider and hour. You may see better past midnight in your case, assuming you do not have Regional Settings (or custom Locales) that display as 08:00 instead of 8:00.

Depending on the Font family and weight, that extra space is more or less visible.

And to add to that, Fira Nerd font and some other Nerd font families were not displaying the divider vertically centered. Would have to test if that’s still the case.

I know 1 space is not a lot, but when you have a visually consistent theme this extra space stands out, you tend to look at it, you loose focus and your work’s workflow is impacted.

I am trying to find an acceptable workaround for our distribution which is used obviously all around the World with various RegSets and Time formats. The workaround needs to respect these requirements.

[Denis_Yurin]

So i have updated and can’t make now my clock to look as it was before, standard “|”-symbol is not vertically centered, and there is no way to make it to appear as before. SAD.

[FGD]

Yes, that’s exactly what I mentioned here.

So far I haven’t heard of any acceptable workaround.

You can:

1. Change your Time format from 12-Hour to 24-Hour format
2. Change your Font family to one that vertically centers the | (Nerd fonts might not center and possibly other families. I found that Noto families and most of Google do center vertically)
3. Change the Font weight, sometimes Bold vs Normal might help or make it worse!

All these workarounds have drawbacks and none of them will fix the fact that when the hour has 1 digit (all the time with 12-Hour format and from 1:00 to 9:59 in 24-Hour format) the divider will not be centered horizontally, cuz Digital Clock is reserving an extra space that takes place of the left digit of the hour. When it is not in use, there is always an extra space.

I agree with KDE that this is not a bug, but it’s a design flaw. It’s not consistent with how the clock should look like. For the user there is no valid reason to leave an unused extra space there. I am pretty sure there are limitations in the code that caused this, I understand, I am just saying how the user sees it from his/hers perspective.

If you want you can re-open the above issue report and see what they say.