What a legend.
Both Calibre and Gimp are great examples of outsider design.
Works amazingly well.
Looks amazingly bad.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Legend indeed.
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.
Presenting... MultiPSK!
https://swling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/MPSK-Fig1...
Put forward your vision
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?
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.
Now, Monstar has a bizarre issue (at least in my setup) where it displays blank instead of capital A when used with Fixedsys Excelsior, for some reason. But hey it starts in under 10ms.
edit:typo
It's easy to customise, super fast, light on resources, available in my distro's package manager and while the author might be a bit prickly at times, he does a fantastic job leading the project and keeping things focused.
I'll give the new shaders a try but the animated cursor is probably busy enough for me already.
https://github.com/dobladez/clview
About to push a big optimization for big directories/collections
This feature seems like interesting timing in light of the above: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog/#restore-after-log...
> https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog/#restore-after-log...
Whoa, this is great news!! For years, it has been Mr. Goyal’s standpoint, and quite understandably so, to not offer this natively due to implementation effort [0]. I just put up with that (yes, technically, you could save-and-restore window and terminal session states, but that doesn’t help in case of an unexpected quitting/crash event), since the man is already undervalued for all of his incredible work – I urge any user of either Kitty or Calibre to check out [1]!
Same as for you, Kitty has effectively been the only terminal I use for years now, chiefly due to `edit-in-kitty` when ssh’d onto another machine, as well as the image protocol for a full file explorer experience, e.g. Yazi [2]. I’m also in the Rex beta, but until they add that, or an improved version of the protocol (as apparently streaming of too much image data is holding their protocol/performance back at the moment) I unfortunately can’t see myself switching, even though in principle I very much agree with this sentiment:
> I bet that Superlogical's Rex is going to take over the world.
[0] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/1197#issuecomment...
enabled_layouts fat
map kitty_mod+l no_op
map kitty_mod+enter no_op
# disable open/close
map kitty_mod+n no_op
map kitty_mod+w no_op
I love kitty, have used it for a long while now and pretty happy, except for that one thing about ssh xterm - but even that is mostly minor.
Really cool to see such active development of an already perfectly capable and working software.
Host *
SetEnv TERM="xterm-256color"I respect the man’s ideological correctness, but it’s not 1982 anymore and nobody is going to add more terminal types.
For example pikvm exists with read-only mounted filesystem. Having to dive into the details to figure out that the issue is kitty trying to write a file to make some obscure terminal features work doesn't strike me as good design.
`alias ssh="TERM=xterm-256color ssh"` fixes it but isn't mentioned in the docs.
It was a setting in some ~/.ssh config file though I believe, not a kitty setting.
alias ssh="kitty +kitten ssh"
sshpass() { TERM=xterm-256color command sshpass "$@"; }
Could also alias sshpass differently but I mostly use that for embedded devices where I just want a simple shell anyways.
The alternative you mean is in ~/.ssh/config:
Host *
SetEnv TERM="xterm-256color"When do you use this? (guessing, when you run something that crashes the terminal?)
Possibly related: I use ctrl+shift+h (and somehow configured it to use neovim), which is a nice way to navigate the terminal history - useful when pilfering through thousands of lines of local server logs
It keeps segfaulting, takes a long time to actually start, I keep getting weird glitches whenever I have multiple panes open in a window (which is pretty much always the case), the tab bar is hard to style and I'm missing some of the macos features (like giving a tab a coloured pin).
Okay, that's pretty cool. How does it handle spacing though? Do the columns in ls/top/etc still line up?
I’m surprised no one out together a ghostty theme for kitty. Kitty seems to pushing boundaries with features and concepts
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/blob/master/docs/faq.rst...
People like to say that kitty is performant, but I haven't found ghostty to be otherwise.
> Similarly, some monospaced font families are buggy and have bold or italic faces that have characters wider than the width of the normal face, these will also result in clipping. Such issues should be reported to the font developer. Monospaced font families must have all their characters rendered within a fixed width across all faces of the font, otherwise they aren't really monospaced.
Serious question.
PS: another difference is installation size, on macOS Kitty is about 246 MB while Ghostty is 67 MB (and it looks like Kitty comes with a glslang shader compiler and python 3.14 frameworks, which together already take up 32 MB).
TL;DR: it feels like Ghostty is paying a bit more attention to platform-specific aspects than Kitty.
Also funny/sad: both call themselves 'cross-platform', but then don't support Windows (only various UNIX variants).
This still qualifies as cross-platform though. Cross-platform doesn't mean "all the platforms" or "all the platforms with the biggest market share in the segment of the application".
Both might have thought 'If you are patient enough to tolerate a slower web based start menu, you are probably not a target market for a hardware accelerated terminal' :D
That's the one thing I always check first in a terminal because I have this pet project to run emulators in a terminal ;)
https://github.com/floooh/chipz-kitty
(works fine in Kitty and Ghostty, wezterm theoretically also supports the Kitty protocol but at some point just freezes)
A scan of this list doesn't indicate any breaking changes: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog/#id1
gz on the release
Awesome. I built a janky version of this for myself but I’m glad it’s supported natively now.
Kitty has some nice ideas, but I don't know ... I am getting lazy, so tabby works for my use cases on Windows (mostly just a fancypants wrapper over cmd.exe really; I don't even use powershell anymore, ruby or crystal cover all my scripting needs, including the assumption of OOP in shells).
I wish there were regular official releases that would help it get more traction. Last official release is 2.5 years ago, despite continuing development. This could drive some people away. OTOH, maybe that's the point...
https://cmder.app/ , in case the (many) other products with the same name shows up in searches.
Both are clearly LLM-assisted projects, but https://noctty.com/ has a very Claude-esque front page whereas https://wintty.io/ doesn't set off my LLM detectors nearly as badly. However, Wintty's download page says "Prebuilt builds are for sponsors. The source is free and always will be, and you can build it yourself" so if you decide you don't like that business model then you may wish to try Noctty, which does have prebuilt binaries.
NOTE: I have not spent any amount of time with either of those, so I can't give personal recommendations either for or against either.
https://jcd.pub/2026/11/04/screenshake-shaders-for-kitty/