How do I display dates in queries as relative?

[voximity]

By default, dates in queries are shown as their raw values (i.e. 2024-01-27). I'm interested in seeing some text like "today," or "tomorrow," or "in 8 days." Is this possible with a query option or some other setting? I wasn't able to find anything relevant in the documentation.

[claremacrae]

You've got two options:

• Using one of the snippets in the Show and tell post Due date styles ✨
  • But note that it is limited to date ranges within 7 days before or after today.
• By using a custom group and putting relative dates in the heading.
  • There are many examples of custom group instructions in the Due Date section of the grouping docs. They also work for scheduled, start, happens or any of the other date fields.
  • This will almost certainly be your best bet - substitute due with whatever field you want to group by:
    • group by function task.due.fromNow.groupText

[voximity]

Thanks for the quick response! This is some helpful information. I'd be interested to see this as a built-in feature or query option. Has this been discussed before? If I find time I might be interested in contributing it. I was shocked that it wasn't already a built-in given how parsing relative dates in queries and the task editor is such a prominent feature.

[claremacrae]

Well shocked is a bit strong 😄 , but yes I would love to see this area improved for built-in searches.

There is a lot to talk about, though, about how this might be implemented.

I have in mind to rewrite the query parsing before adding a load more cases to the parsing, as I want to see the parsing also support syntax highlighting and auto-completion of queries when typing.

The more features are added to the current query parser, the harder that migration is going to be.

If you’re up for chatting about this and potentially contributing, please drop an email to the address in my profile and let’s have a chat about implementation tactics.

Thanks for offering!