> But it's got such market and mindshare for open source e-reader software that there hasn't been much room for other folks to try something different.
This contains the misunderstanding that merely by existing calibre "uses up" something like oxygen. This is true in a commercial product when there are a finite number of buyers whose money in turn funds a finite number of merchants efforts to bring a product to market.
In open source software users are finite but on average worthless except insofar as they constitute a funnel whereby some microscopic portion may in some instances become contributors but more often than not that funnel is virtually non-existent with contributions coming from the same small cadre of developers.
> The UI feels very dated to me
Perhaps the worst reason to make a different piece of software. Modern usually is synonymous with an oversimplified interface which shoves much functionality into a junk drawer and makes it easy to do some subset of easy things and hard to do anything else.
Although quite usable out of the box the calibre UI is also very customizable and trivial to figure out how to customize
- You can add or remove functions to right click menu or tool bars
- tool bars by default has both icons AND text and you can change the icons if you want something that looks more "modern"
- The default layout has a toolbar, search bar, list of books, info about the selected book, and a tag/author/series etc browser toolbar.
- If you were wondering how to change the layout there is a button on the bottom right that says "layout" alongside a colorful icon. If you click it you can choose a pretty cover grid view and hide both the book info and tag browser. Congrats it now looks "modern"
- not only can you set single character shortcuts because they only operate when the cursor isn't in a text field but the preferences menu for shortcuts makes it easy to search for a function by name in order to bind and the shortcut so chosen is shown by the function.
- It has a search that is both powerful and works exactly how you would think it works
For having a huge pile of functionality it is probably one of the most usable pieces of software I use regularly. It works in a fashion that suggests the author uses it and has thought a lot about what would make it easier to use.
I'm also a little lost at what slow means here as on Linux it like virtually every desktop app that isn't based on electron it responds instantly and briskly. Perhaps it works poorly on Mac?