The Time and Location Tab

Documentation / Contents - Location and Time

• Overview of Location and Time
  • What It Changes, and What It Does Not
  • The Window
  • The Buttons
• The Time and Location Tab
  • Choosing a Timezone
    • Follow system timezone
    • 12-hour clock (AM/PM)
  • Location
• The Language and Formats Tab
  • Locale (LANG)
  • Language
  • Currency
  • The Sample Line
• The Environment Tab
  • Session Exports
  • The Preview
  • The Shell Startup File
    • Which File Is Detected
    • How the Write Behaves
• Files and Settings
  • The Configuration File
  • The Keys
  • Environment Variables Read
• Command Line and Keys
  • Command Line
  • Keyboard
  • Mouse
• What This Panel Does Not Do
  • Out of Scope by Design
  • Not Built
  • Known Rough Edges
• Fonts, Colours, and the Rest

Other cards

• Copyright Information

The Time and Location Tab

This tab carries two boxes: Timezone and Location.

Choosing a Timezone

The box titled "Timezone:" holds a text field labelled "Timezone (IANA):" and a scrolling list of zone names underneath it.

• Click a zone in the list to put its name in the field. Double-clicking does the same thing.
• You can also type into the field directly. A zone that is not in the list is accepted; the field is not validated against the list.

Zone names are IANA names, the same ones the system timezone database uses: Rivendell is not a zone, but Europe/London, America/New_York, Asia/Tokyo and UTC are. The default is taken from the TZ environment variable, and UTC if that is not set.

The list is built by reading the system zone database. The first of these directories that exists is used, and the search stops there:

/usr/share/zoneinfo
/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo
/usr/lib/zoneinfo

Housekeeping files in that tree, such as zone.tab, posixrules and the leap second tables, are left out of the list. If your machine has no zone database the list is empty and you must type the name.

Follow system timezone

The toggle "Follow system timezone (informational)" is off by default. The word in parentheses is literal: the setting is recorded and read back, and nothing acts on it. It does not grey out the field or the list.

12-hour clock (AM/PM)

Off by default, which means a 24-hour clock. The only thing this changes inside this panel is the sample time on the Language & Formats tab. It is recorded for other programs to read.

Daylight saving is not shown here. There is no UTC offset display, no zone abbreviation, and no indication of whether the zone you picked is currently on summer time. The zone database handles all of that when a program uses the zone.

Location

The box titled "Location:" holds one text field, labelled "Display name (city / region):". It is a label for humans and nothing more. Type Minas Tirith in it if you like; no clock, no zone and no format is derived from it. It is empty by default.

Next

• The Language and Formats Tab
• What This Panel Does Not Do