Howto get a 24h clock on the login screen

Posted on Thu, 26 Jul 2012 in Apple

I'm using a slightly modified locale on my Mac because I like everything to be in english1. However, I do not like the english date formats using AM and PM2, so I fixed that by customizing the locale.

Unfortunately this customization doesn't fix the clock on the login screen, but this neat little shell command does:

{% codeblock lang:bash %} sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences AppleLocale en_GB

Please not that this might also change your keyboard layout, which mean that some keys and symbols might not be where you expect them to be.
Fortunately you can turn on the Input menu in the login screen in System Preferences ➡ Users & Groups ➡ Login Options.

  1. I do this because it makes it easier to communicate with people in other countries when talking about OS X. ↩

  2. It's almost as bad as not using the metric scale. ↩