Over time I learned to appreciate the vision: it’s not the stereotypical modern streamlined app, it’s the cockpit of a spaceship. It’s AutoCAD for ebooks. I really enjoy that application, I haven’t even scratched the surface of its featureset.
A designer might indeed add more space but not necessarily hide stuff. Design works within constraints, and if the constraint is everything should be visible, then it needs to work like that.
That interface would benefit from more space in areas. Note for example how the descenders of letters (look for “g” or “y”) bleed into the bottom shadow (the “side”) of the buttons. It’s definitely tight. It gets worse with the bold areas. On the top right you seem to have buttons, labels, and a text field, all using the exact same font at the exact same size, all in bold and with no spacing between them. It makes it harder to focus on information, and everything is so close together that you’ll either have misclicks or be slower as you put the cursor in just the right place.
Sure, have that interface for the hardcore users, including those who are going to use the keyboard to interact with every part of that, but it’s not a failing to add more space, and menus aren’t always wrong.
People love making fun of designers, but it’s the toupée fallacy, you notice it when it’s bad. There’s a reason “good design is invisible” is a maxim. Like on every field, there are good designers and bad designers.
I, right now in 2026 and at least one decade later, get at most 59 lines of code at once in my primary editor (Panic's Nova) on a 27" monitor.
That is almost the same ratio.
It's stylistically denser than a typical 59 lines of code, then macro-densified and 'golfed' further.
IMO, Foobar2000 [0] was/is the zenith of bespoke GUI programs from that era. The UI is clean, the menus make sense, it’s infinitely configurable but the defaults are fine, it supports plugins…
I love Calibre, but isn't this every FOSS project.
Calibre works amazingly well.
It looks amazingly bad.
Both are great examples of outsider design.
Like calibre, I guess :)
Obligatory: I miss Rdio. That was them too.
Lots of people. It’s great that you don’t, really, but Calibre is very ugly¹ and I have no doubt that limits its adoption. Subconsciously, people associate ugly apps with unpolished or unfinished apps.
I don’t use Calibre (I rely instead on command-line and bespoke tools) but I do recommend it to less technical people and I always make it a point of saying “it’s very ugly but it does everything and does it correctly, it’s the gold standard for what you want to do” because I’m pretty sure if I didn’t add that disclaimer the people I recommend it to would think they downloaded the wrong thing or abandon it as soon they opened it.
¹ That’s just personal opinion, we don’t need to have a debate about that. If you find Calibre beautiful, more power to you.
I’m impressed but also… that’s a lot of effort.
I don’t use a Kindle (it’s a Kobo, those are very hackable) and don’t use my tools to manage the reading list, I prefer to do that on device. But sure, I’m not claiming it’s for everyone, there’s a reason I recommend Calibre to other people. My needs are fairly minor, I don’t even use any of the popular alternative interfaces like KOReader.
> I’m impressed but also… that’s a lot of effort.
Not that much effort, and the tools have evolved as my habits did. I’ll give you one simple example of such a tool: I can select an EPUB and press a keyboard shortcut which actions it in Alfred to first convert it to to a Kobo EPUB with kepubify and then upload to Dropbox with rclone. I can then download it from the Kobo manually.
I had another which would take the URL of the frontmost browser tab, download and convert it to EPUB with pandoc, then it’d reuse the same kepubify and rclone steps. That one doesn’t work that well nowadays, with all the websites getting harder to access programatically due to all the LLM scraping.
Neither of those needs a lot of code, and I’m still relying on other tools for the heavy lifting. It’s just that for my specific personal needs, this is faster and more convenient than using Calibre.
Outsider design? It means it’s designed by someone self-taught or not classically trained in the subject. It’s neither insult nor praise, it’s a classification, though often used as a way to express something as being unconventionally interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_music
> It is design produced by the user and maker of the app. If you hire a designer that's neither, doesn't that actually make them the outsider?
No, because “outsider” refers to “outside the world of design” not “outside the world of this product”.
> He's not making a traditional art form as someone who's untrained.
Your parent comment didn’t claim they were making art. But they are designing the app are are clearly untrained in design. Again, that’s not an insult. How many of us here are self-taught programmers?
> He's designing Calibre, and he's the most qualified person in the world in doing that.
That doesn’t necessarily follow. If that were the case there would be no designers, everyone would just do their thing. The point of learning design is to understand what works and why and how to apply it. It is perfectly valid for you to have a vision of what you want the thing to do but to need help in presenting it more effectively.
But design is functional. Grows organically by needs of the user. If so many people swear by Calibre, it is well designed for calibre’s use case. It is not only about the aesthetic design trends. They don’t need to apply a coat of liquid glass and modern icon treatment to make it well designed.
This appeal to authority is why we end up with everything looking like Juicero of software. Shiny, the same components and pricing plan as everything else. But absolutely soulless and often user hostile.
I don't think many of those artists were celebrated during their lifetime, or at least not until the their form became more widely accepted in the mainstream.
Which is what I said.
> If so many people swear by Calibre
There’s no true alternative. A lot of people use Calibre despite how it looks, because it does all the things. The world of messing with ebooks outside the vetted stores isn’t that big.
> It is not only about the aesthetic design trends.
I didn’t even so much as hint that. Please don’t straw man.
> They don’t need to apply a coat of liquid glass and modern icon treatment to make it well designed.
Again, no one said that. I personally dislike Liquid Glass.
> toolbox
Again, there’s nothing wrong with that nor have I claimed there is.
> This appeal to authority
There was no appeal to authority. You completely misunderstood the comment, fabricated an argument in your head and are fighting that.
Fucking hell, HN is tiring. Stop being so angry all the time, we’re not on opposing teams. Not every comment is a criticism or disagreement for you to rally against.
There are lots of things that do bits of what Calibre does (Kavita, Librum, KOReader, Koodo, etc), but nothing comes close to replacing it.
I don't see you berating people for complaining, after all if the purpose of this website is intellectual curiosity then comments complaining aren't in line with the purpose right?
No one complained about anything, read the parent comment to the comments I replied to. The comment I replied to just suggested vibe coding out of nowhere.
> berating people
Come on, let’s please not be ridiculous. My comment was as polite as can be while presenting a disagreeing opinion. You don’t need to fake outrage, there’s enough of that in the world already, and it’s a major reason why everything is turning to shit.
> after all if the purpose of this website is intellectual curiosity then comments complaining aren't in line with the purpose right?
Uff, HN is so tiring. More and more it proves right everyone who calls this “the orange site”. Look, you’re clearly not a dumb person, there’s no need to play one and make arguments in bad faith. This is not hard to understand:
If there is something detrimental which you perceive as being done in excess, you should call it out and ask the person to stop, even if you have to go outside the norms a bit, for the greater good of the community. If you are, for example, in a renaissance fair and a couple of guys are being disruptive, it’s absolutely fine to break character to get them to stop; you don’t have to do it while pretending to be a medieval peasant, and it’s idiotic to suggest that would have to be the case.
It’s supremely stupid and frankly embarrassing for this community that I have to point this out as if we’re children. Don’t be Mr Gotcha, he’s not smart and no one likes him.
that's exactly what i'm doing. there's so many people on here complaining about LLMs in general, I perceived your comment in that same class and thought that it too wasn't adding anything to the discussion. The suggestion to use LLMs is, I think, useful. People might not have thought of it, might not know what the underlying code of calibre is and how easy it would be to modify with an LLM.
I view suggestions, even if rote or obvious, more useful than negative comments like yours.
The same could be said of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50364936
which you interpreted as combative on the basis that it implies you are 'mad' about something. I wouldn't interpret their phrasing as such.
In this case, a poster who sees your own post as hostile ("berating people"), you describe it as "fake outrage"', which seems to imply their perception is a dishonest one. Their are other impolite and combative elements there too, e.g. "you’re probably not a dumb person", "This is not hard to understand".
The point is, this response is not de-escalating, but the opposite.
Moving on, that example is different because not only is that solution specific to the problem and teaches you something, it’s also not as pervasive. Suggesting a keyboard shortcut to change text size is like teaching you how to hammer a nail, while telling you to vibe code is like telling you to hire a carpenter. Sure, you can hire a carpenter for your problem, but everyone already knows that is an option and it’s too general. It’s not a solution to the problem, it’s a suggestion of an approach and doesn’t even have a helpful guiding direction. Again: not interesting, doesn’t advance the discussion, and no one learns anything.
There are cases where it's not only an obvious option, but also the only viable one e.g. suggesting to someone they should hire a lawyer: the advice there isn't just that they have this option, but that this is the only viable option, and that otherwise taking legal advise from a forum is dangerous; IANAL-YANAL-GAL!
Legend indeed.
My takeaways are to redouble my efforts to vet software I rely on, and to appreciate my distros more. It looks like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and possibly many others had quietly spotted and resolved the issue in their distributions even before this bug report.
Apart from that, Kovid avoids providing proper packaging except for self-extracting installers and tends to create new "standards" like Calibre's web server instead of ODPS and in Kitty's case the whole annoying lot of Kitty-derived and Kitty-standardized features every terminal emulator is now supposed to support, which also break existing compatibility -- with the usual "you are holding it wrong" arguments when someone points it out.
In my opinion, Kovid is the original vibecoder -- extremely productive, extremely functional, extremely successful but despite the code quality, not because of it. I'm somewhat glad it works for him, I just wish I could use his products without getting aneurysms while wrapping my head around them.
And I specifically avoid all software from both of those people precisely because of their attitudes towards others.
I'm not asking anyone else to do the same, I know it's a wildly unpopular opinion and people will attack me for it.
But boycotts in general wouldn't exist if everyone could separate the art from the artist.
I agree that he could do a lot better with controlling his emotions. Me and him are on the opposite ends of the tmux debate for example. But I understand his point, he's trying to solve the same problems that tmux solves, with a very different way.
The problem is that Kitty isn't there yet (I wish it was) and his outburst on the topic are quite damaging to his goals.
When you've met and worked with people in real live that are like that, you can just visualize them and have a laugh at their outbursts.
I'm still team Calibre and Kitty any day and tremendously thankful for what he's doing.
As for kitty, it seems some of its new standards have unlocked actually useful features, especially in AI's terminal-powered era. But creating new standards and breaking compatibility ought to be avoided unless necessary.
Like what?
What an odd complaint; it's not like he's going about to other projects forcing them to add them. I suspect the reason some of Kitty's standardized features are being independently adopted by other terminal emulators is because they are genuinely useful.
But really Kitty is the GOAT because of the customization ethos. Just top-notch.
Correct, kitty-keyboard-protocol or kitty-image-protocol are actually useful and thats why Ghostty for example supports them. The alternatives are often worse or only have niche benefits (looking at you sixels)
No terminal is "supposed" to support them. Terminals (like ghostty) choose to do so because they find them to be good and worth supporting.
What a legend.