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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

> Goyal hates multiplexers so he refuses to do it.

So very on brand for him.

Why people keep investing themselves into Goyal's one-man-fiefdom projects is a mystery to me. I haven't used kitty, but I absolutely loathe Calibre more than any other software I use. The man couldn't design a user interface to save his life, common functions nearly everyone wants are time-consuming to set up, and the fact that calibre-web is better in every possible way speaks volumes. It took me years to realize that calibre-web had nothing to do with him, otherwise I would have switched much sooner.

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I don't get this open reluctance of people that contribute a lot of time and work towards open source. Sounds a lot like entitlement to me.

I don't know anything about the drama you mention. I just know kitty is a fine terminal emulator I use all the time (also with tmux/byobu) and I am thankful the author created it. Calibre I also use from time to time and it works for my purpose. I am happy it exists and I can just shovel my ebooks onto my kindle.

It sounds like you used Calibre for years but still complain about it even though it's free..

Usually I agree but the maintainer of kitty is bonkers rude. There have been several issues concerning privacy and security regarding kitty. The responses of the maintainer regarding these very valid concerns made me switch to wezterm/sakura/foot in an instant.

He also accepts lots of PRs from contributers. Once you do this, it is no longer your project only.

An example PR (there are a few others equally concerning): https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/pull/3544

I see. I read the PR you linked and have to partially agree. Yes the maintainer's reaction was rude and seemed much like an overreaction. However the original comment could also be seen as offensive and lecturing.

I don't want to defend phone-home mechanisms because I am personally not a fan but an update check really is different from surveillance. I in general agree with the comment that the feature should be opt-in but the argument was not presented in a good way.

Yes, you are right. I am also highly opinionated, when it comes to opt-out phone home functionality in terminal software. Just wanted to point out where some of the drama comes from and also make aware of possible consequences. I could imagine people are not opening security PRs or issues because of the maintainers attitude.

Kitty does everything I want out of a terminal multiplexer out of the box already. Sure, there are other features that might be gained by using tmux inside a terminal that has extra support for it, but as a maintainer he makes the call if it's worth the complexity to add features he doesn't use and disagrees on whether it's a good fit for his app.

Even if you open a pull request for this, that is asking the maintainer their many many hours of future maintenance and support they have to do to keep this feature alive and improved, all for free.

> Why people keep investing themselves into Goyal's one-man-fiefdom projects is a mystery to me.

You gain some, you lose some. Kitty is really low-latency and renders most Unicode shenanigans correctly (the main exception being RTL text). I can live with the fact that I don't get a normal menu bar on Wayland then :-)

calibre-web is not a replacement for calibre. The real hard part is all the ebook conversion stuff, which calibre-web can do by... calling calibre binaries. So saying "it has nothing to do with him" is quite the statement.

Calibre has saved my bacon countless of times. It's absolutely crazy how many crappily formatted epubs are out there (not pirated ones, mind you, but bought from stores). Without Calibre to clean these up, my reading experience would have been so much worse.

I'm very curious what kinds of fixes you're talking about. Would you mind expanding a bit on what's broken and how you fixed things?

This one https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web ? It does indeed look a lot neater.

I unfortunately have to use Calibre to convert Kindle Ebooks into a sensible format. One needs to fight Calibre so it doesn't destroy any images in the conversion process.

I don't say that this CLI tool is a replacement for Calibre, but it covers all my needs by converting FB2 books into EPUB and making some cosmetic fixes:

https://github.com/rupor-github/fb2converter

Does calibre-web support syncing collections from PC to Kobo ?

> The kobo sync with calibre-web is only for books. You can choose to sync your entire library or just a specific shelf. You add books to that shelf and sync, it will make sure the books on that shelf are on your kobo.

>For syncing reading progress across devices KOReader is apparently the way to go. You can setup syncing on there and any device that has KOReader installed will have the same reading position.

From google.

+ OPDS support regardless of device

Thanks, I haven't yet switched to koreader so I'll stick with calibre (and its horrible UI, I agree) for a while.

I'm using calibre-web + Boox Darwin. Maybe not as functional as some other solutions, but you get a great personal library and books sync over opds. (Not progress sync, but I don't really need it)

I use Calibre as an epub reader. Does anyone know of good alternatives on Linux? I’ll look into calibre-web of course.

Mupdf with plugins for lightweight fetishists? Foliate for lazies like me. Okular if your running KDE/Plasma already?

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