I guess changing the docs a little bit may require a little less intellectual efforts on attention-lacking readers like me. Let me tell you what confused me:
Having a large monitor, it did not occured to me that some people would want a shorter format for the date/time when the bar gets crowded so they can get a few character space back. I realize now that if you are on a 11-inch display you may not want to display the date, seconds and such unless you have spare space in your bar. So I misunderstood what was meant by "short_time" and "long_time" and stupidly assumed it was a different way of parsing the %date %time variables. Since I wanted to display the time as %H%M only and no date, the "long_format" sounded like what I didn't want!
This, and the fact that you provide two examples in separate code boxes. If I had to write the docs for myself, it would read something like that:
"The date/time format follows the strftime nomenclature (link to it), e.g.:
Code: Select all
long_format=%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S
short_format=%H:%M:%S
i3situation will switch to the short_format when i3bar runs out of space etc"
I guess having both long and short formats in the same code example section would have cleared the confusion. Please note that I am not saying that you should have or should alter the docs the way I am saying, I just wanted to explain why I misunderstood the documentation. The above would have worked better for me, maybe not for others!