[[!tag idea gnome]]

Enrico wrote about setting locale variables for gdm. This reminded me that it would be nice if one could tweak the locale settings for a user in GNOME with a nice GUI app.

There are a lot of people who might, for example, want to have their computer speak English to them, because the translations to their native language are not particularly good. Or perhaps they would prefer French, because they live in France, and it's practical to not have to keep translating between languages all the time.

At the same time, they might want to have things sorted in the order their native order, or dates in the way they are used to, or do some other tweaking.

This is easy to achieve, as Enrico shows, by setting LC_MESSAGES to, say, en_NZ.UTF-8, but LC_COLLATE and LC_TIME to to fi_FI.UTF-8.

For many people, the problem is that tweaking these things by setting variables in a dot-file is scary. Having a GUI for doing that would make things easier.

When I mentioned this to Enrico, he suggested:

Very true indeed. A preview of things like sort order, messages, date formatting, currency would also act as a fancy showcase of what locales can do. Quite a lot of work to put them together, though.

Anyone up for the task?

Ideally, one would change the default GNOME session and/or gdm to source a file (~/.config/locale.conf if it exists) where these settings could be stored, but to start with, one could just edit .xsessionrc, with proper precautions.