0.2.0

Bring your calibre settings with you

The welcome wizard now opens on a setup page with three choices. Moving from calibre takes one click, and your calibre stays exactly as it was.

The first page of the welcome wizard.

• Bring over my calibre settings. Your library, plugins and preferences come across. It shows up when calibre’s settings are found on your computer.
• Start fresh. Calibre Zen’s own settings, with a library you pick on the same page.
• Advanced. Pick the settings folder, the library, and which settings and plugins come over.
• Apply & Continue. The Next button says this whenever pressing it changes something, so you know the work happens right then.
• A language button sits in the corner of the wizard’s footer.
• Any folder can hold a new library. A folder with other files in it used to be a dead end. Now it asks first, and nothing in it is moved or removed.

Advanced lets you choose each group of settings.

Advanced has a switch for each of these groups. Every plugin in the plugins folder gets its own switch too.

• General
• Toolbar and menus
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Conversion
• Devices and email
• Sharing over the net
• Metadata download
• Viewer and book editor
• Window sizes and positions

Good to know

• Look & feel stays behind. A font or icon size from calibre breaks the new look in small ways everywhere, so Advanced does not offer it either. Your language is the one thing that comes over.
• A backup comes first. When you run the wizard again and replace your settings, Back up my current settings first is ticked for you.
• It copies once. Changes you make in calibre later stay in calibre.
• Both apps can open the same library. Use it in one app at a time.
• calibre’s install id stays behind. A paired phone or the content server sees two apps, not one.
• Plugins are listed as files. A plugin’s settings file is not matched to its plugin, so pick both.

Updates from inside the app

Updating used to mean finding the right file on GitHub, downloading it and running it yourself. Now the update window downloads the new version and installs it for you.

When a new version is out.

The download, with its progress.

Ready to install.

• Download picks the right file for your copy, checks it, and saves it in your Downloads folder.
• Install and restart does the rest. On a Mac the app closes, swaps itself and opens again in a second. On Windows the usual installer runs by itself, then the app opens again.
• The status bar says how it went on the first start after an update. It names the new version, or warns you if the update did not install.
• What’s new opens these release notes.
• A copy that updates elsewhere says where. That covers Homebrew, the Flatpak, the Microsoft Store and the Linux archive.

Good to know

• It starts with the next release. 0.1.0 does not have this, so moving up to 0.2.0 is a normal install one last time.
• Each update is the full app, about 470 MB on a Mac, not a small patch.
• The Mac updater is tested end to end. Windows is newer, so if an update does not go through, the installer stays in your Downloads folder to run yourself.
• An app folder you cannot write to opens the installer instead, so you can drag the app in yourself.

A smaller Edit metadata window

Edit metadata used to open nearly as big as the screen. Now it opens at a calm 880 by 640, with tabs, and every field is drawn the same way.

Details, grouped into Book, Your library and Publication.

• Four tabs. Details, Description, Cover & files, and Your columns. The last one appears when your library has columns of its own, with a count.
• Details groups the fields under Book, Your library and Publication. Labels are never cut off. The sort fields and dates fold away under Sort fields and dates.
• Cover & files shows the cover large beside its actions. The book’s files are a list, with named buttons under it.
• Your columns reads like a settings form. Each field is sized to what it holds, and notes get a real text area.
• Download metadata shows each match as a card, with a preview of what would change. Covers to choose from appear as tiles. While it searches, and when it finds nothing, it says so clearly.

Cover & files.

Your columns, as a grouped form.

Good to know

• Compact is the new default. If you picked a layout in Preferences, you keep it. calibre’s three layouts are still in the list, under Look & feel, then Edit metadata.
• The description has its own tab, so you cannot read it while fixing the title.
• The small clear buttons are gone from Details. On Your columns, clearing a field is still a trash button beside it.
• Download metadata stays open when nothing is found. It shows a message and the log, where it used to close by itself.
• Match cards show a letter, not a cover. calibre only downloads covers on the second page.

Across the app

These changes reach every place calibre uses the same controls, not just the editor.

• Ratings are five stars you click. They sit in the editor and in the book list, with a way to clear them. The mouse wheel no longer changes a rating by accident.
• Dates open a calendar drawn in your theme, with Today and Clear buttons.
• Drop-down lists match the menus. They have roomy rounded rows and the right font.
• Number fields are the same height as the fields beside them, with two small chevrons.
• The rich text editor has one border and its toolbar fits on one line.

Double-click to edit

Double-click a cell in the table and you edit it right there. Stars and dates open their own editors. Double-clicking a cover in the grid still opens the book.

To read a book from the table, use Read in the preview or on the toolbar. If you prefer the old way, set the doubleclick_on_library_view tweak to open_viewer in Preferences, under Tweaks.

Cover shape in the grid

The grid’s view menu has a new Cover shape choice. Uniform crops every cover to one shape, so each shelf has a straight edge. Natural shows each cover whole, standing on the floor of its tile.

Uniform, the default.

Natural.

A natural cover that is much wider than it is tall looks small. That is calibre’s own fit, just seated lower.

A reset for Look & feel

calibre’s Look & feel settings can quietly break the new look. That page in Preferences now says so, and offers a way back.

The notice at the top of Look & feel.

Reset to Calibre Zen’s defaults offers to back up your settings first, then asks whether to restart now. After a reset the page closes without saving, because saving it would write the old values back. If you pick Later, Preferences stays shut until you restart.

Dark mode you can read

• A selected row in a list or tree is filled with the accent colour, in every scheme. It keeps a slightly deeper accent under the pointer.
• The icon on a dialog’s main button, like the check on Apply, takes the colour of the button’s label. It used to vanish into the button.

This fixes issue 4.

Linux

• A Flatpak for x86_64 and arm64. It adds menu entries for the app, the viewer and the editor. It opens your existing library, your calibre-zen settings and your plugins.
• An install command. install-zen.sh --latest downloads the newest release, checks it and puts the app folder in place. Give it a .txz you already have and it installs that one instead.
• A clear message when a file is missing. If an unpacking was cut short, the launcher names the missing file and says how to fix it. This fixes issue 11.

Good to know

• The Flatpak can see your files and readers across the computer, as calibre’s own Flatpak does. That is how it reaches your library and your device.
• The Flatpak is not on Flathub yet. To update it, install the newer bundle from the release.
• The install command works in the current folder. Move an older calibre-zen folder aside before installing again.

New in calibre 9.15

calibre-zen now runs on calibre 9.15, so its new features and fixes come along.

• Highlights in the viewer can be picked together and restyled in one go. A highlight’s note shows when you hover over it.
• The viewer has a button to switch between saved window sizes.
• The cover grid has a setting for where emblems sit.
• Create your own Adventure is an optional writing game. Add it from the toolbar settings to try it. Its screens still use calibre’s own look for now.
• Fixes for Read Aloud, Word documents, metadata and the cover grid’s background, among others.

For the curious

The details behind the changes above, for anyone who likes to know how things work.

Switches

Every new part can be turned off on its own. The switches are in the features menu, under the Calibre Zen mark on the toolbar. Each one has an environment variable too, which wins over the menu.

Part	Menu entry	Variable
Edit metadata window	Compact editor	CALIBRE_ZEN_EDITOR=0
Star ratings	Star ratings	CALIBRE_ZEN_RATING=0
Calendar	Calendar	CALIBRE_ZEN_DATES=0
Download metadata	Download metadata	CALIBRE_ZEN_DOWNLOAD=0
Look & feel notice	None	CALIBRE_ZEN_LOOKFEEL=0
Bring over from calibre	None	CALIBRE_ZEN_IMPORT_FROM=0
Cover shape	Cover shape	CALIBRE_ZEN_GRID_CROP=0 pins Natural, 1 pins Uniform
Updates	None	CALIBRE_ZEN_UPDATE=0

Turning a part off gives back calibre’s own version of it. CALIBRE_ZEN_IMPORT_FROM also takes a folder, to bring settings over from somewhere other than calibre’s usual place.

Where things live

• calibre’s settings are looked for in ~/Library/Preferences/calibre on macOS, in calibre under AppData on Windows, and in ~/.config/calibre on Linux. The Linux Flatpak’s folder is checked as well.
• Backups sit beside your settings folder, named with -backup- and the date and time. Caches and lock files are left out.
• The editor layout is the edit_metadata_single_layout setting. The compact one is called zen.
• The cover shape is stored as zen_grid_covers.
• Updates are read from latest.json on the newest release. Each file there now has its own url, and the feed can name a notes page for What’s new. CALIBRE_ZEN_UPDATE_URL points the check at another feed, which is how the updater is tested.

What counts as Look & feel

The import and the reset both treat these as Look & feel.

• Fonts, icon size, icon themes and custom images
• Colour palettes and the interface style
• Toolbar text and the layout buttons
• The settings for the cover grid, book details, tag browser, bookshelf, cover browser, Quickview and the Edit metadata layout
• Row spacing and row numbers in the book list, and the splash screen

Everything else in the same files is kept.

Under the hood

• Every change is tested before it ships. The tests open the real main window on a small library and check what is painted, pixel by pixel. They run on each pull request, with a lint and a compile of the whole tree.
• Two large test libraries of public domain books make it easy to check speed with thousands of covers.
• The base is calibre 9.15.0, pinned in packaging/upstream.json.

Installing

The packages are calibre’s own 9.15.0 builds with Calibre Zen laid over them. Nothing is recompiled. Installing the new package is the update, and your library and settings stay where they are. From 0.2.0 on, the app can do this for you.

• Windows. calibre-zen-0.2.0-windows-x64.msi installs and upgrades in place. The portable installer upgrades a Calibre Zen Portable folder and keeps its library. The packages are not signed yet, so SmartScreen warns on first run. Choose More info, then Run anyway.
• macOS. calibre-zen-0.2.0-macos.dmg works on Apple silicon and Intel, signed and notarized. Drag Calibre Zen to Applications and replace the old one.
• Linux. calibre-zen-0.2.0-linux-x86_64.txz or the arm64 one, installed with install-zen.sh. Or the Flatpak, calibre-zen-0.2.0-linux-x86_64.flatpak or its arm64 twin.

Note

Each file has a .sha256 beside it, so you can check the download. All of them are on the releases page.