How to get 12-hour clock in i3

At the beginning of our look into some neat tricks with i3, we are going to see how to get a 12 hour clock (with seconds) under i3. This assumes that you have the proper packages installed

• i3-wm (sometimes called i3, either as a standalone or meta package)
• i3status
• i3bar

We are going to edit the global configuration file for i3status, a program that creates a status line for i3bar. The file is located over at /etc/i3status.conf, in case you know what you're doing and want to jump ahead of this article.

Open that file as root, and you should see something that looks like this:

Where it says time{format = "_"}, that is where the magic happens. The string supplied here is passed through a C function called strftime, which is the standard timestamp formatting tool across all Unix-like systems. The format they use with 24-hour clocks has the "%H" in the string. Find where it says "%H" inside of that string, and change it to "%l" to get the 12-hour time.

To see all of the options available, type "man strftime" at your terminal emulator.



 The format I use across all of my bars and time-tools is "%a %b %_d %Y %H-> %l:%M:%S", which comes across like this: