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points by vconnor 4 days ago | 0 comments
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.