From the collection
Hermitage
Built for the single user who wants a modern desktop experience over a Calibre library without Docker or a web auth layer in the way. Reads metadata.db in mode=ro and turns a 4,000+ item library into a cinematic gallery: an edge-to-edge cover grid with median-cut colour quantization for per-book accent tinting, a sliding hero-banner detail sidebar (the Codex), and a recursive genre browser that unfolds dot-separated Calibre tags (Fic.Fantasy.Grimdark) into a navigable tree.
Native support for Virtual Libraries and the full Calibre search-query language (Ctrl+F), powered by cquarry (the shared engine behind CalibreQuarry and bindery-cli), with a 512-entry texture LRU and three-tier colour cache to keep scrolling smooth on integrated graphics. Ships hermitage-verify, a standalone CLI that audits integrity, cover presence, and format resolution; the v0.16.0 audit sweep added the project’s first in-tree test suite and lint hygiene behind it. The v0.17.0 pass took it tiling-first: libadwaita is gone in favour of plain GTK4 under an owned Kanagawa Dragon stylesheet that follows the system dark/light preference through the desktop portal, with floating overlay sidebars, grid type-ahead, and per-scale HiDPI thumbnails. Zero telemetry, zero network calls, zero accounts. A Flatpak ships alongside the native build: 8 MB, sandboxed, with arbitrary library paths reached through the file-chooser portal. The 1.x line graduated the app to a stable v1.0.0 in August 2026, packaged for PyPI alongside the Flatpak, after a regression gauntlet against a live 7,600-book library; the releases since have ridden cquarry’s growth: page counts in the Codex, user categories resolved natively through the search grammar, and a v1.8 performance tier that stopped bulk-fetching every book’s comments at startup.