fix(i18n): format relative times with the configured UI language

[moseoh]

Summary

With the UI language explicitly set to English on a Korean-locale machine, relative timestamps still render in Korean — the Tasks issue list shows 그저께 / 5일 전 / 34일 전 in the UPDATED column while every other label is English.

Eight renderer call sites built new Intl.RelativeTimeFormat(undefined, { numeric: 'auto' }); the undefined locale resolves to the Chromium/OS locale, not the configured UI language. Affected surfaces: the Tasks UPDATED column, GitHub/Linear/Jira item views, PR page timestamps, account usage rows, workspace-space labels, and the activity page.

Unlike Intl.DateTimeFormat (where following the OS region for numeric date shapes is conventional — those call sites are intentionally unchanged), RelativeTimeFormat emits language words ("2 days ago" / "그저께"), so it must follow the UI language — consistent with the direction already established when #7188 made the configured UI language win over the OS language.

The fix replaces the per-module formatter constants with one shared locale-keyed cached getter (getUiRelativeTimeFormatter). This keeps the zero per-row allocation behavior TaskPage relied on, while staying correct across runtime language switches — which module-scope constants could not, since they froze the locale at import time.

Screenshots

Before (UI language: English)	After (UI language: English)

Testing

• pnpm lint / pnpm typecheck
• pnpm test — new unit tests for the helper (UI-language formatting, cache reuse, runtime language switch, resolvedLanguage fallback) plus all touched-area suites (TaskPage/task-page-cache, AccountsPane, status-bar, activity — 350+ tests) pass; full-run failures are the workstation's pre-existing environment-dependent ones, identical on main
• pnpm build
• Verified in the running dev app: with UI language English on a Korean-locale macOS, the Tasks UPDATED column renders English relative times

AI Review Report

• Swept the renderer for every Intl.RelativeTimeFormat construction (9 sites including two found beyond the initially reported one) and confirmed no undefined-locale constructions remain.
• All supported UI locales (en/zh/ko/ja/es) and the pseudo-localization locale (en-XA) are valid BCP-47 tags, so the constructor cannot throw; the "System" language resolves to a concrete locale before reaching i18n.
• One existing test compared against an OS-locale formatter (workspace-space-format.test.ts); it now pins 'en', which also makes it deterministic on non-English machines.
• Cross-platform: locale resolution is identical on macOS/Linux/Windows; no shortcuts, paths, or platform APIs touched.

Security Audit

No new inputs, IPC, or command execution — the change only threads the app's existing i18n locale string into Intl.RelativeTimeFormat construction.

Notes

Intl.DateTimeFormat(undefined, ...) call sites are deliberately out of scope: numeric date/time shapes following the OS region is defensible and changing them is a broader product decision. If maintainers want those unified too, the same locale-keyed getter pattern extends naturally.

ELI5

Relative times (“5 days ago”) followed the OS language even when the UI was set to English. They now follow your configured Orca language everywhere those timestamps appear.

[coderabbitai]

📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

Adds cached, locale-aware relative-time helpers with minute/hour/day formatting and invalid-date fallbacks. Renderer timestamp displays across issue, pull request, activity, account, and workspace scan views now delegate to the shared helpers. Tests cover locale selection, formatter caching, runtime language changes, fallback behavior, relative-time phrasing, and deterministic workspace scan-time output.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4 | ❌ 1

❌ Failed checks (1 warning)

Check name	Status	Explanation	Resolution
Docstring Coverage	⚠️ Warning	Docstring coverage is 16.67% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%.	Write docstrings for the functions missing them to satisfy the coverage threshold.

✅ Passed checks (4 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly states the main change: relative times now use the configured UI language.
Description check	✅ Passed	All required sections are present, including screenshots, testing, AI review, security audit, and platform coverage notes.

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[coderabbitai]

Actionable comments posted: 1

Caution

Some comments are outside the diff and can’t be posted inline due to platform limitations.

⚠️ Outside diff range comments (1)

src/renderer/src/components/GitHubItemDialog.tsx (1)

342-359: 📐 Maintainability & Code Quality | 🟠 Major | ⚡ Quick win

Extract duplicated relative time formatting to a shared utility.

This formatRelativeTime helper logic is duplicated across multiple component files (and several others in the codebase context, such as PullRequestPage.tsx and TaskPage.tsx). Consolidate this logic into a single shared utility to adhere to the DRY principle and simplify future maintenance.

• src/renderer/src/components/GitHubItemDialog.tsx#L342-L359: Extract this function to src/renderer/src/i18n/relative-time-format.ts (or similar utility file) and export it.
• src/renderer/src/components/JiraIssueWorkspace.tsx#L60-L74: Replace this local implementation by importing the new shared utility.
• src/renderer/src/components/LinearItemDrawer.tsx#L104-L121: Replace this local implementation by importing the new shared utility.

🧹 Nitpick comments (1)

src/renderer/src/components/status-bar/workspace-space-format.ts (1)

46-56: 📐 Maintainability & Code Quality | 🔵 Trivial | 💤 Low value

Store the formatter instance in a local variable.

getUiRelativeTimeFormatter() is called in every conditional branch. Although the underlying instance is cached, extracting it to a single variable at the top of the logic improves readability and aligns with the implementation pattern in other files.

♻️ Proposed refactor

-  if (Math.abs(diffMinutes) < 60) {
-    return getUiRelativeTimeFormatter().format(diffMinutes, 'minute')
-  }
-
-  const diffHours = Math.round(diffMinutes / 60)
-  if (Math.abs(diffHours) < 24) {
-    return getUiRelativeTimeFormatter().format(diffHours, 'hour')
-  }
-
-  const diffDays = Math.round(diffHours / 24)
-  return getUiRelativeTimeFormatter().format(diffDays, 'day')
+  const formatter = getUiRelativeTimeFormatter()
+  if (Math.abs(diffMinutes) < 60) {
+    return formatter.format(diffMinutes, 'minute')
+  }
+
+  const diffHours = Math.round(diffMinutes / 60)
+  if (Math.abs(diffHours) < 24) {
+    return formatter.format(diffHours, 'hour')
+  }
+
+  const diffDays = Math.round(diffHours / 24)
+  return formatter.format(diffDays, 'day')

---

ℹ️ Review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: Repository UI

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro

Run ID: 30921f54-5140-4cfe-b6be-5fdf6f966243

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 81cc966 and 3720297.

📒 Files selected for processing (12)

• src/renderer/src/components/GitHubItemDialog.tsx
• src/renderer/src/components/JiraIssueWorkspace.tsx
• src/renderer/src/components/LinearItemDrawer.tsx
• src/renderer/src/components/PullRequestPage.tsx
• src/renderer/src/components/TaskPage.tsx
• src/renderer/src/components/activity/ActivityPrototypePage.tsx
• src/renderer/src/components/linear-issue-workspace-text.ts
• src/renderer/src/components/settings/AccountsPane.tsx
• src/renderer/src/components/status-bar/workspace-space-format.test.ts
• src/renderer/src/components/status-bar/workspace-space-format.ts
• src/renderer/src/i18n/relative-time-format.test.ts
• src/renderer/src/i18n/relative-time-format.ts

[AmethystLiang]

Thank you for this, @moseoh — really clean, well-scoped work. 🙏

The approach is the right one, and I want to be explicit about why since it's a subtle call: Intl.RelativeTimeFormat emits language words ("2 days ago" / "그저께"), so it should follow the configured UI language, while Intl.DateTimeFormat emits numeric date shapes that conventionally track the OS region — leaving those on undefined is correct, not an oversight. This matches the direction #7188 already set (UI language wins over OS language). English labels sitting next to Korean 5일 전 is unambiguously the bug.

I also verified the sweep is genuinely complete: the other relative-time surfaces I found (WorkspaceCleanupDialog, pr-comment-time.ts, ReviewNotesSendMenuContent, automation-page-parts) hardcode English strings like ${hours}h ago rather than constructing Intl.RelativeTimeFormat, so they don't have the OS-locale bug — that's a separate "never localized" gap, out of scope here. Every RelativeTimeFormat(undefined) site was migrated.

The one thing I acted on: the fix left eight near-identical copies of the minute/hour/day branching around getUiRelativeTimeFormatter. I pushed a follow-up commit (9266eb8) that centralizes them into two shared helpers — formatUiRelativeTime(diffMs) and formatUiRelativeTimeFromDate(input, fallback?) — net −65 lines, behavior unchanged, with added unit tests. I deliberately left AccountsPane.formatMiniMaxRelativeRefresh bespoke: it has a translated "just now" branch and a past-clamped, asymmetric rounding convention that the symmetric helper would shift by one at exact half-unit boundaries, so folding it in wasn't behavior-preserving.

Typecheck, oxlint/oxfmt, and the touched suites (relative-time-format, workspace-space-format, task-page-*, AccountsPane, ActivityPrototypePage — 117 tests) all pass locally.

Follow-up worth a separate issue, not this PR: the hardcoded-English Xh ago sites above should eventually go through the same locale-aware path.

Approving. Thanks again for the careful diagnosis and the before/after screenshots.

[moseoh]

Really enjoying Orca — thanks for building it, and thanks for the detailed review and cleanup!

[nwparker]

Thanks for this, and sorry it sat so long. The bug is real: those relative times were following the OS locale instead of the configured UI language.

main has since extracted formatRelativeTime into work-item-state-presentation.tsx, so rather than rebase the diff I reimplemented the same fix against the current layout and credited you (and @jinjing-lee for the follow-up commit) as authors. It's in #12514, as a shared getUiRelativeTimeFormatter() routed through getIntlLocale() and applied to the eight call sites. That routing also closes a RangeError that plugin language packs would otherwise hit, since they register under a synthetic language tag Intl rejects.

Closing this in favor of that branch once it merges — the fix and the credit are yours.

[nwparker]

Merged into main via #12514, which consolidated the open community translation work into one branch. Your commit is on main with you as its author — I used a rebase merge specifically so every contributor's commit and co-author trailer survived intact rather than being squashed into one.

Closing this in favour of that. Thank you for the fix, and sorry it took as long as it did to get through.