Hope someone can help.

I am trying to set the Date/Time on the Menu Bar to show the date and times as the following:

Friday, October 21, 2016 9:00 AM.

I go to "System Preferences/Date & Time/Open Language & Region/Advanced/Dates" to tweak the look I want.

I can highlight the FULL option, but I do not know how to set it. The instructions are to "drag" the choice, BUT to where? When I try to drag the box to the bar, the selection just slides back to the box. No matter what I click on/select, the changes do not take place for the DATE.

Obviously, I am missing something about the procedure. Is there a special knack for setting this?

You don't say which System version you are using, but in osMac 12 when I go to the "Date & Time" System Preference, I can get what you want (although it is shown as Fri Oct 21…) just by checking the options "Show…in menu bar" and under "Date Options" checking "Show day of the week" and "Show date". It automatically appears in the Menu Bar; no dragging required.

" . . . I can get what you want (although it is shown as Fri Oct 21…) . . . "
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Sorry, but that is NOT what I want. I want the day of the week to be spelled out in FULL . . . like it shows in the System Preferences "option" box (not the abbreviated style of the LONG or MEDIUM options).

My question was/is: How do I get the FULL version to show on the Menu Bar?


P.S. I am using SIERRA.

Ahh, I see, you are looking in "Languages and Regions". Yes, I have the same problem. You can set the display to show long formats but it does not stick on the Menu Bar.

I am running MacOS 10.12.1 beta 4 or 5 and as far as I can tell the date & Time display on the menu bar is independent of the settings for date and time in Preferences Language & Region. On the theory that might be a hidden preference setting, I also looked in the long time standby freeware utility for OS X configuration settings TinkerTool 6, its more robust shareware sibling TinkerTool System 5, and the everything you ever wanted to configure but didn't know how paid utility MacPilot 8 and came up empty handed 👎.

If someone were to spend enough time digging through Apple's Developer documentation they might find it, but I don't have the patience to do that.

Thanks for your labour of love! With all that effort, if you have not found the answer then I doubt anyone else will have much luck either.

Odd that Apple would show the unabbreviated style for the days of the week/months of the year in the FULL format, but then not show that option in the menu line.

Well, at least I haven't completely lost all my marbles . . . yet.

I don't know about labour of love, its more like terminal curiosity.

"Terminal" curiosity. Cute.

Not to be any less curious, have you got any idea what purpose the setting under Language & Region serves?

Changing it doesn't even affect the day/date in the clock dropdown.

It must be there for some reason.

There are a variety of different apps that pick up the date and/or time for inclusion in documents, meta data for images, etc. and will use the Full, Long, Medium, or Short form. To see this in action, open a document in Pages then on either the menu bar or the Tool bar select Insert âž­ Date & Time.

Thanks.

It seems like it would make more sense to have all time & date settings in one location or to at least make it clear why they aren't, but...

I assume (yes I know the danger of assumptions) the clock function in the menu bar is buried in some core service somewhere and tying the display to the Date & Time settings is or was at the bottom of some software engineer's ToDo list and there is always something ahead of it.

However in looking around for an answer to this question, I discovered an interesting new menu bar feature in Sierra that I hadn't even thought of looking for. The right hand menu bar elements have always been fixed in place by Apple, but in Sierra Control+Click+Drag can reorder all of the elements on the right end of the menu bar including date & time but excluding Siri and Notifications. (After all these years with the date & time being toward the far right it is going to take me a while to adjust to where I have placed it now.) But I am finding it helpful to group the icons on that side of the menu bar in groups that make sense to me.

" . . . Control+Click+Drag. . ."




Thanks for the tip. Makes me wonder: Was this trick available in earlier versions of OS X, too, and I just didn't know?

P.S. For me, however, it is COMMAND+Click+Drag.

This is an interesting feature, yes, but the only new part is the ability to move third party icons. I've been reordering date and time, script menu, volume, character viewer, and other menu extras for many years by command dragging them. I'm betting you've done so as well, but just fell out of the habit a while back.

" . . . the ability to move third party icons."

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Ahhhh.

That explains why I could shuffle some icons around and not others. It just hadn't occurred to me that the "others" were all 3rd-party applications. Duh!

Wow!

It's about time.

Thanks for the clarification.

Great tip, Joe, thanks!

That's been user-adjustable for quite some time now.

As for the date thing, that only changes the output of a specific set of API calls that apps can either use or do their own thing, so only apps that try to display the time the way the user has requested it are going to do so. Everybody else can play their own banjo.

LONG time ago I recall seeing someone post WHERE the "format string" was stored. And from there you could go in and edit it to anything you wanted. It's just using the DATE command from terminal, which is extremely robust. Sorry I don't recall where that was, and I'd wager it's moved by now.

I use this one for time stamping log entries:

command: date "+%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S"

outputs: 2016/10/24 12:00:03

the default format:

date (equivalent to date "+%a %b %d %T %Z %Y")
Mon Oct 24 12:00:32 CDT 2016


man date for (lots) more information, and for the geeks: date "+%s"

It would be a wonderful feature if my positioning survived a restart, but I've got to juggle my icons every time.

" . . . but I've got to juggle my icons every time . . . "

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Odd. Upon starting up, mine stay where I placed them before the last shutdown or restart. These will only move if I do so manually using COMMAND and the mouse cursor.

Clarification: My Apple menulets still turn up where I want them; it's only my 3rd party items that don't hold their position after a restart.