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points by anonymous_i 4 days ago | 0 comments
I recognized him name from Calibre: https://calibre-ebook.com/about

What a legend.

[–] Alien1Being 4 days ago
It is the Gimp of book management.

Both Calibre and Gimp are great examples of outsider design.

Works amazingly well.

Looks amazingly bad.

[–] kar1181 4 days ago
So true. Main thing is both are still being built and used everyday though.
[–] asdfsa32 4 days ago
For the lack of a better functional alternative, not because it is the ideal.
[–] indymike 4 days ago
Sometimes functional is ideal.
[–] solyin 3 days ago
In the case of gim paint, Photoshop is RIGHT THERE, it just costs money, and who's got extra amounts of that lying around?
[–] osener 4 days ago
What does that even mean. 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?

He's not making a traditional art form as someone who's untrained. He's designing Calibre, and he's the most qualified person in the world in doing that.

[–] latexr 4 days ago
> What does that even mean.

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 unconventional and 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 it refers to “outside the world of design” not “outside the world of this product”. It’s two words but a single term.

> 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.

[–] osener 4 days ago
Outsider art, outsider music refer to art, and even in those practices a lot of celebrated artists are the ones that eschew the established norms.

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. Software like Calibre are a toolbox full of screwdrivers and random things that are not in the same color hue and size and rounded corner treatment. You open the toolbox and immediately know what you need to reach for and where, get the job done and close it.

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.

[–] Geezus_42 4 days ago
> Outsider art, outsider music refer to art, and even in those practices a lot of celebrated artists are the ones that eschew the established norms.

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.

[–] latexr 4 days ago
> Outsider art, outsider music refer to art, and even in those practices a lot of celebrated artists are the ones that eschew the established norms.

Which is what I said, in different words. If you understood the term, why did you ask what it meant?

> 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, didn’t even so much as suggested that. I personally dislike Liquid Glass.

> toolbox

Again, there’s nothing wrong with being a toolbox nor have I claimed there is.

> This appeal to authority

There was no appeal to authority. You paid no attention to words in the comment, you 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.

Calibre is great and I’m happy it exists. I recommend it to people despite not using it myself (I make my own tools). When I used it I found it to be very ugly and at times confusing and found it could benefit from applying some basic well-understood and researched design principles. But that’s all my opinion. You’re welcome to have yours, I don’t care, use whatever you like. Just please don’t mischaracterise my words and don’t come all angry and citing misapplied fallacies at me. I didn’t do that to you and would appreciate the same courtesy. Don’t stoke hate.

[–] osener 4 days ago
Sorry I made you feel like this. There are no shortage of “Calibre but well designed” tools, as long as Calibre has existed. I am just tired of hearing Calibre and other open source apps are badly designed as if that is an objective fact. So I ranted against a general sentiment rather than your arguments in particular and I did not mean to put words in your mouth or offend.

However, when can we accept a design stands the test of time and maybe it is in fact well designed? So many objects that are considered well designed today look that way because they got refined over the time and designed through their goals and constraints. Only in retrospect we call those well designed because they were original and not designed by committee. Can you give benefit of the doubt that maybe Gimp’s, Emacs’ and Calibre’s of the world might be in that category?

[–] tweetle_beetle 4 days ago
As far as I was aware, there definitely is a shortage of "Calibre, but well designed" tools. What are these tools?

There are lots of things that do bits of what Calibre does (Kavita, Librum, KOReader, Koodo, etc), but nothing comes close to replacing it.

[–] Geezus_42 4 days ago
Your point would make sense if hiring designers wasn't the mainstream.
[–] tasuki 4 days ago
Hiring designers isn't the mainstream for people who develop a thing for free in their spare time for everyone to use.
[–] shimman 3 days ago
Your point would make even more sense if you realized that not everyone cares about capitalist goals when developing software. Some people want software to work for everyone, not just those with money or means.
[–] Geezus_42 3 days ago
I also want software to work for anyone. I never said anything about capitalist goals. I pointed out that the person building calibre can still be considered an "outsider" in the art sense, since they are not part of the mainstream who hires designers. Work on your reading comprehension bud.
[–] shimman 2 days ago
No, you only want software to work in a specific way that requires more resources than necessary. Just because you don't understand the outcomes of your beliefs doesn't mean others do not.
[–] Geezus_42 2 days ago
That is not at all what I said. You're making things up on your own.
[–] piokoch 4 days ago
Frankly? Who care. Napster had even worst GUI, yet it has become popular as it just did the job people wanted.
[–] latexr 4 days ago
> Frankly? Who care.

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.

[–] fn-mote 4 days ago
“I manage my Kindle reading list with home-made command line tools” is a very niche situation.

I’m impressed but also… that’s a lot of effort.

[–] latexr 4 days ago
> “I manage my Kindle reading list with home-made command line tools” is a very niche situation.

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.

[–] rithdmc 4 days ago
Did Napster have many competitors at the time?
[–] 63stack 4 days ago
Kaazaa, emule, dc++
[–] riffraff 4 days ago
Those came one or more years after Napster, when it was already wildly popular because it was the only tool that did that job.

Like calibre, I guess :)

[–] rithdmc 3 days ago
They all came over a year or two later right?
[–] Lalabadie 4 days ago
The Kazaa people then used the same base to create Skype (which was "true" P2P for a long time). I'd say they've done pretty good.

Obligatory: I miss Rdio. That was them too.

[–] vconnor 4 days ago
When I first used Calibre I thought it was a disorganised mess trying to cram too many features in one app.

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 now, I haven’t even scratched the surface of its featureset.

I heard the author gets very defensive of his design choices: good, I wish we had more opinionated app developers in FOSS.

[–] sgarland 4 days ago
It’s the archetypal Windows 2000-era power user tool. A million menus, every option you can imagine, and once you learn it, you are god.
[–] tejohnso 4 days ago
At least there are menus, I guess. Some power user tools (eg: vim) don't give much in the way of discoverability. You either internalize a significant amount of knowledge and behaviour, or you hate it and move on.
[–] sgarland 4 days ago
I like and appreciate both, though I grew up as a Windows power user, and hated vi/vim for many years when I got into *nix. It wasn’t until I saw my boss teleport a block of code elsewhere in a file with a few keystrokes that I decided I needed to learn it.

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…

0: https://www.foobar2000.org/

[–] trvz 4 days ago
It's tastelessly designed.
[–] mattkevan 4 days ago
It’s like UI outsider art. The Shaggs [1] of interface design. Can’t decide whether it’s hideous or wonderful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shaggs

[–] bardan 4 days ago
> It’s like UI outsider art.

Presenting... MultiPSK!

https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/MPSK-Fig1...

[–] brabel 4 days ago
I like it. I bet a designer would put lots of space around each box and hide stuff under menus and tabs, thus making the full range of options much harder to get at a glance. Like breaking up your giant function into hundreds of tiny functions. Some people prefer to just see everything at once and I think it’s a valid way to do it.
[–] latexr 3 days ago
> I bet a designer would put lots of space around each box and hide stuff under menus and tabs

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.

[–] mattkevan 4 days ago
Wow, that’s incredible. Reminds me of this

https://arngren.net/

[–] jodrellblank 4 days ago
“hate scrolling”, he mumbled

- https://www.aplwiki.com/wiki/Whitney_C

[–] trvz 3 days ago
Slightly disappointing: he had to put 264 lines of code across 5 files.

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.

[–] jodrellblank 3 days ago
I don't know if you know the reference, but his screenful of code looked like this: https://www.jsoftware.com/ioj/iojATW.htm

(with a post explaining it here: https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u... )

It's stylistically denser than a typical 59 lines of code, then macro-densified and 'golfed' further.

[–] brettermeier 4 days ago
What a band! Thanks for the input.
[–] zaphirplane 4 days ago
Easy to tear down people and ideas, hard to build.

Put forward your vision

[–] kbelder 3 days ago
I've never used it, but I just went and looked at a bunch of screenshots. It looks great to me. Kind of refreshing, actually, compared to more modern UIs.
[–] shaky-carrousel 4 days ago
Tools aren't meant to be licked.
[–] abhinavk 4 days ago
Same with darktable.
[–] Citizen_Lame 4 days ago
"I heard the author gets very defensive of his design choices: good, I wish we had more opinionated app developers in FOSS."

I love Calibre, but isn't this every FOSS project.

[–] pwdisswordfishq 4 days ago
I also recognized his name from Calibre: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027

Legend indeed.

[–] jbvlkt 3 days ago
Even from this bugreport it looks like he learned his lesson. It is 15 years old so it is irrelevant now. It would be long forgotten if it was not archived on the internet.
[–] pwdisswordfishq 3 days ago
I don't know, does it? And has he? Based on other comments in this thread, it seems he is as arrogant as ever.
[–] monk_grilla 3 days ago
Thanks for the fun read.

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.

[–] Onavo 4 days ago
I don't see why people are complaining about the UI. The calibre codebase is just Python and you can vibe code/customize a nicer UI for it in minutes. It's not like the core changes much. Their metadata resolution and Epub handling and (formerly DRM cracking) are best in class.
[–] lowdude 4 days ago
Vibe-coded or not, I prefer staying close to upstream unless I have very good reasons not to, and I would not want to have to half-heartedly maintain a UI fork of this. I would still be quite excited about an official visual overhaul, though
[–] latexr 4 days ago
Can we please stop with the suggesting vibe coding for everything? It’s not an interesting response: it doesn’t advance the discussion and no one learns anything. The goal of this website is (ostensibly) intellectual curiosity, and suggesting AI as a solution to every problem is basically a thought-terminating cliché.
[–] Geezus_42 4 days ago
I agree, but I think the sentiment is "it's opensource, if you don't like it, change it." Saying "just vibe-code it" is just a reaction to the response people would have given to the first statement in past times, which was to complain about the barrier to entry.
[–] tehnub 4 days ago
Would you be mad at somebody for suggesting “Cmd+=“ in response to a complaint about a website font being too small? It’s becoming nearly that easy to fix.
[–] latexr 4 days ago
I’m not mad and I would appreciate if we stopped assuming combativeness from the start. That too is detrimental to discussion and intellectual curiosity, and there’s too much of it on HN. I was polite and courteous while making a comment asking for a change in behaviour. Not every disagreement needs to be a fight.

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.

[–] Chris2048 3 days ago
> but everyone already knows that is an option and it’s too general

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!

[–] jack_pp 4 days ago
programmers are overwhelmingly the type of people to solve problems whenever someone complains about something.

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?

[–] latexr 4 days ago
> programmers are overwhelmingly the type of people to solve problems, whenever someone complains about something.

No one complained about anything, read the parent comment to the comment 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?

Oof, HN is so tiring. More and more it proves right everyone who calls this “the orange site”. Look, you’re probably 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.

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

[–] jack_pp 4 days ago
> If there is something detrimental which you perceive as being done in excess, you should call it out and ask the person to stop

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.

[–] Personability 4 days ago
Suggestions can go either way. "Use an LLM." and "Don't use an LLM." are in the same class of comment. It's quite biased to treat one as a negative comment and the other as a suggestion.
[–] jack_pp 3 days ago
he didn't suggest to not use an LLM he suggested to not even suggest to use an LLM because it's "boring" .
[–] Chris2048 3 days ago
> My comment was as polite as can be while presenting a disagreeing opinion

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.

[–] pronik 4 days ago
That's one of the reasons I avoid Kitty. Calibre's backend is powerful, frontend is a boiling oil level of a hot mess. At some point many years ago I tried looking into the code to maybe separate out the parts I was interested in and had to abort on the first source code page.

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 (and UX) quality, not because of it (to be fair, I haven't looked into Kitty's code). I'm glad it works for him, I just wish I could use his products without getting aneurysms while wrapping my head around them.

[–] bita_nidir 4 days ago
Wow. It works for him and it works for me. I'm forever grateful for what he's done and I feel this bashing is totally undeserved. Kitty and Calibre are two of my favorite software thingies ever.
[–] ranger_danger 2 days ago
I don't think it's undeserved at all. If you followed Kovid's interactions with users over the years you would quickly see he has a cosmically inflated ego and a god complex, and can only speak in absolutes while simultaneously mocking you for daring to even ask a question. He publicly berates and abuses people even much more than Torvalds does.

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.

[–] bita_nidir 2 hours ago
Ah, the post I responded to wasn't talking about Kovid's interactions with users.

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.

[–] demo4567 3 days ago
Also a hostile project admin
[–] DavideNL 3 days ago
How so?
[–] radlad 4 days ago
Have to agree - Calibre is amazing and powerful software, and also incredibly obtuse to actually use. This has always been a massive shame.

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.

[–] febed 3 days ago
> it seems some of its new standards have unlocked actually useful features

Like what?

[–] radlad 3 days ago
Graphics in terminals and better modifier sequences.
[–] a-french-anon 3 days ago
sixel works "fine" though.
[–] smohare 4 days ago
The first time I used Calibre it was such a bad experience I thought it was a joke software. Can’t say I’ve consciously used or wanted to use a single kitty feature, either.

The bar is pretty low for some basic UX, and these two projects consistently fall under. But to each their own.

[–] hiyer 3 days ago
> in Kitty's case the whole annoying lot of Kitty-derived and Kitty-standardized features every terminal emulator is now supposed to support,

No terminal is "supposed" to support them. Terminals (like ghostty) choose to do so because they find them to be good and worth supporting.

[–] stryan 3 days ago
> 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.

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.

[–] ghosty141 3 days ago
> I suspect the reason some of Kitty's standardized features are being independently adopted by other terminal emulators is because they are genuinely useful.

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)

[–] bbor 3 days ago
Yeah nothing made me more confident in my choice of terminal (after trying quite a few) than seeing that "Kitty" graphics protocols are all over the place for SotA TUIs. Love to see it!

But really Kitty is the GOAT because of the customization ethos. Just top-notch.

[–] krrrh 4 days ago
Ironically a dozen vibecoders just read this and are kicking off rust clones. A few of them will be end up being pretty good.
[–] alt-machine-ref 3 days ago
I am one of them, I just keep adding kitty features to my alacritty fork.
[–] fullstop 4 days ago
I hope that he's learned from his mistakes: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027/