Hacker News Reader

Comment by submeta | Hacker News Reader

Kovid Goyal, the developer of Calibre, is a very responsive, very gentle person. Whenever I needed help, I have gotten help from him. [1] - Calibre is an indispensable tool for me to manage my digital library with close to 800 books.

I support him regularly. Consinder doing it as well if you appreciate the app. Go to https://calibre-ebook.com/ , there’s a support link on the top right.

[1] This is the forum dedicated to Calibre https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166

View on HN

OT, but he also happens to be the developer of kitty, my favorite terminal emulator on Linux: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty

Yeah kitty is amazing. I've been meaning to donate as a thank you. It's made so many things possible. In fact, because of it's flexibility, today I wrote a vscode extension that can use some of kitty's remote control features so I can execute things in my terminal of choice straight from my editor of choice.

uh, that's interesting! what's the name of the extension?

https://github.com/kbd/binrun

I just wrote it today and still need to package it. I was tired of alt+tab + up arrow + enter constantly to execute builds etc. in my terminal. It calls out to a kitty wrapper script I wrote[1] that (eg) queries kitty for its running windows so that when I launch from vscode it can find the right kitty window for the vscode workspace and execute there...

Point is, Kovid Goyal is awesome and the extensibility he wrote into kitty makes all that possible. I didn't know he was also the author of Calibre for a long time.

[1] https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/master/HOME/bin/kw

Their github issue handling did not give me the same impression that parent has of him.

I think he’s really dedicated to making a specific thing and gets frustrated when users ask for “Swiss Army knife” features. I have empathy for that situation.

That said, being unkind to otherwise civil users is never OK.

There are so many good projects out there AND with good people running them. (Not saying kitty's dev is not a good person.) I like to use free software created by people who are pleasent to deal with, because more often than with closed source software, we'll end up having to communicate for one reason or other. :) My favorite terminal chosen in this fashion AND technical merit is wezterm. It really is fantastic all around.

I had no idea! Awesome.

I interviewed him once. Such a kind and responsive developer. He told me he put 80 hours per week, on average, in Calibre’s development.

Edit: the interview (in Spanish) https://calibre.softonic.com/articulos/entrevista-a-kovid-go...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com