This is a fair critique actually. And this shouldn't be the default. It is for now because I haven't gotten around to making Biff read your POSIX locale settings and converting them to a Unicode locale. If you build with `cargo build --release --features locale` (or get Biff from a release binary), then you can do:
$ BIFF_LOCALE=en-US biff
Thu, May 28, 2026, 6:38:09 AM EDT
If that doesn't work, then you can enable logging to see an error message:
$ BIFF_LOCALE=watwat BIFF_LOG=warn biff
2026-05-28T06:39:08.876336708-04:00[America/New_York]|WARN|src/main.rs:76: reading `BIFF_LOCALE` failed, using unknown locale `und`: failed to parse `BIFF_LOCALE` environment variable: The given language subtag is invalid
2026 M05 28, Thu 06:39:08
What you're seeing is what ICU4X does when the user's locale is unknown or undetermined. The `M` prefix occurs to indicate that the number is the month, and is unrelated to the name. For example:
$ BIFF_LOCALE=watwat biff time fmt -f '%c' '1 month'
2026 M06 28, Sun 06:39:50
alt Hacker News
This is a fair critique actually. And this shouldn't be the default. It is for now because I haven't gotten around to making Biff read your POSIX locale settings and converting them to a Unicode locale. If you build with `cargo build --release --features locale` (or get Biff from a release binary), then you can do:
If that doesn't work, then you can enable logging to see an error message: What you're seeing is what ICU4X does when the user's locale is unknown or undetermined. The `M` prefix occurs to indicate that the number is the month, and is unrelated to the name. For example: