Numeric Clock 17.7: a numeric date and time for the GNOME top bar, with GNOME 51, menu styles, About and Donate

GNOME's top bar shows the time as Oct 22 13:17, and there is no setting to change that. Numeric Clock is my free, open-source GNOME Shell extension that turns it into a clear numeric date and time: 22/10/2026 13:17:05, 2026-10-22 13:17, 10/22/2026 01:17:05 PM, or any other strftime format you like. It works on GNOME Shell 45–51, on Wayland and X11.

Versions 17.6 and 17.7 are the biggest update in a while, so here is a quick tour first:

New in 17.7: About and Donate, and the menu opens where you click

• About Numeric Clock and Donate are now right in the quick menu, both from the tray icon and from a right-click on the clock. About opens Preferences straight on its About page.
• Fixed: after right-clicking the clock, the next left-click on the tray icon opened the menu over by the clock. The menu now always opens under whatever you clicked. Spotted in daily use, fixed the same day.

Each click on the tray icon does something different

The clock icon in the top bar used to open the same menu on every click. Now:

• Left-click opens the quick menu: copy the time, pick a preset, change the menu style, open Preferences or About, or donate.
• Right-click opens Preferences.
• Middle-click copies the current time to the clipboard.

Right- and middle-click are configurable (quick menu, Preferences or copy time), and hovering the icon shows the time plus a reminder of what each click does.

You can also right-click the clock itself for the same menu, which opens right under the clock. A left-click on the clock still opens the GNOME calendar.

Menu styles: System, Light or Dark

The quick menu and its tooltip follow your shell theme by default, or you can make them always light or always dark, from Preferences or straight from the menu.

Eight presets, one click each

International (DD/MM with seconds), weekday, compact, time only, ISO 8601, ISO date with the week number (new), US 12-hour, and top bar only. Each preset in Preferences shows a live sample, so you see the result before you apply it.

Rebuilt Preferences

Preferences now use libadwaita rows bound straight to the settings, so a change made from the panel menu shows up live. There is a live preview, a built-in list of format codes, the menu style, and what each click on the icon does.

Fixes that came out of an audit (17.5)

Before adding features I went through the clock engine line by line, and found real bugs:

• Seconds could lag by up to a second. After the first tick, "smooth tick" used GLib.timeout_add_seconds(), which GLib shifts by a per-session offset to save power. Each tick now lands within about 10 ms of the second boundary.
• An invalid or empty format blanked the clock. GLib.DateTime.format() returns null instead of throwing, so the old try/catch never caught it. Both now fall back to the default format.
• Disabling the extension left your format on screen until GNOME's next minute tick. The stock clock now comes back immediately.
• With "Only change the top bar clock" turned off, any label containing a day or month word, or a time like "meeting at 10:30", could be overwritten, including notifications. Now a label is only touched when its whole text looks like a clock.
• The panel icon was redrawn on the 16 px pixel grid, so it is crisp next to the other status icons.

And one fix in 17.6.1: Preferences opened with the format field focused and selected, and every key press was saved, so a stray key could replace your whole format. The format is now saved only when you press Enter, and formats without any % code are refused.

Install or update

Download [email protected] from GitHub Releases, then:

gnome-extensions install --force [email protected]
gnome-extensions enable numeric-clock@nickotmazgin

On Wayland, log out and back in. On X11, press Alt+F2, type r and press Enter.

Every release is built by GitHub Actions from an SSH-signed tag, is immutable, and has a build-provenance attestation. You can check a download yourself:

gh attestation verify [email protected] --repo nickotmazgin/Linux-Numeric-Date-And-Clock

How it is tested

• An isolated nested GNOME Shell smoke test (its own D-Bus session and settings) runs 36 checks: formats, tick alignment, menus and where they open, click actions, menu styles, About, and disable/enable cycles.
• A Preferences test runs in plain gjs.
• ESLint, ShellCheck and CodeQL run on every pull request, and main requires all of them plus signed commits.

The demo video above was recorded the same way, inside that nested shell, so nothing on my real desktop was clicked. The narration is Kokoro-82M (Apache-2.0) and the music is an original synthesised track.

Compatibility

Links

• GitHub: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/Linux-Numeric-Date-And-Clock
• Latest release: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/Linux-Numeric-Date-And-Clock/releases/latest
• Changelog: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/Linux-Numeric-Date-And-Clock/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md
• Announcement and questions: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/Linux-Numeric-Date-And-Clock/discussions/76
• Demo on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VlcEy6rQHBw

My other GNOME extensions: ClipFlow Pro (clipboard history) and Comfort Control (EaseHub) (a compact panel menu).

Numeric Clock is free and MIT licensed. I direct, review, test and sign every release; AI coding assistants (including Claude Code) helped with parts of this work, and the README credits them. If it saves you a squint at the top bar, a ⭐ on GitHub helps other GNOME users find it.