Implement a thousands separator display switch

[bitigchi]

It would be nice to have a thousands display toggle switch for the folks who'd like to have their numbers displayed without the thousands separator.

Currently it will have not much of an effect, since nearly all numbers use the standard C display, they'll need to be converted first.

[nephele]

This seems quite specific. Perhaps a more "generic" preffered number format could also be used? That is say, also allowing stuff like engineering notation (with *10³ 6 etc) or scientific (always *10^{N with only one leading digit)}

Maybe that is too specific though :)

[bitigchi]

No, my case is more for simple numbers. It's alright to use 1.234,56 for instance, but sometimes it looks quite convoluted in some applications like ActivityMonitor. 1234,56 looks more compact in cases like this, or some people simply would like it that way. Turning it on or off by default would be another matter to discuss.

[pulkomandy]

We used to allow full customization of the formats in Locale preferences, but it was removed.

In most cases I think no one really wants the thousands separator by default? It seems too risky to have it, because it's easy to confuse it with the decimal point (unless the thousands separator is some kind of whitespace)

[bitigchi]

Yeah, by default it would be too much I guess.