Change Library menu?

[Forester1]

Hi all! My Calibre Library has several topical libraries (nonfiction, historical fiction, Mystery, etc). I go back and forth a lot, and to prevent accidents, I would like to "comment out" or disable or remove the "Rename Library" and "Remove Library" menu options on the Library toolbar menu. Is this possible? Also, would it be possible to put all of the library names in the main menu, instead of having to go to "Quick Switch"? Thank you all in advance for any advice you may have!

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Forester1

Hi all! My Calibre Library has several topical libraries (nonfiction, historical fiction, Mystery, etc). I go back and forth a lot, and to prevent accidents, I would like to "comment out" or disable or remove the "Rename Library" and "Remove Library" menu options on the Library toolbar menu. Is this possible? Also, would it be possible to put all of the library names in the main menu, instead of having to go to "Quick Switch"? Thank you all in advance for any advice you may have!

Remove only removes a name from the LIST, the library is not touched. (If yo click that, you will see a message telling you that you MUST delete the folder using the OS if you really want it ALL GONE

[BetterRed]

I think I saw someone recently post that they use shortcut keys to switch to different libraries - but I can't find anything to do that - so perhaps I dreamt it - or they know calibre better than me, which wouldn't be hard

And have you ever had a look at this Managing subgroups of books, for example “genre” ?

I have two permanent libraries. One with ~20,000 work related publications; mainly academic & govt papers etc, journal articles, media clips, press releases etc, just a few ebooks of historical interest. The other with a about a hundred non-work related e- books.

The work related library was originally multiple libraries somewhat like yours, but I found there were things I wanted to do that I couldn't. That was because the core features of Calibre are restricted to working on one library at any one time. So I now have them all in one library using a hierarchical subgroups as described in the link above.

I find its much less work having one library - eg I only define a tag once.

BR

[Forester1]

Thank you TheDucks! Yes, I figured that out after a moment of panic when I accidently hit "Remove Library". I guess that is why there is no (Are You Sure?) on that action, it just does it. I was just hoping to disable it so it wouldn't happen again. I could hopefully re-enable it sometime later if needed.

[Forester1]

Thank You BetterRed! And thank you for the link. I read it, but it didn't sound like what I wanted. I actually want separate libraries by Genre so that the main library is not just this humongous amalgamation, although I grant that you can easily filter on just about any field. But if you are ever working with files and directories, Windows sometimes gets a little bit slow when they get into high numbers, so just from the Operating System perspective I thought separate folders would be better. (I realize that I shouldn't actually DO anything with files and folders outside of Calibre, but sometimes I like to list or view what is there). I will have to think about it some more, it was just the way I was thinking I wanted it to be.....

[BetterRed]

@Forester1 - You're probably right, assuming you are using a FAT32 file system.

You may not know that Calibre does not access the folders unless it has to, like when you copy a book to a device. Most of its work is done via its database - metadata.db - there's one of them in every library

BR

[Forester1]

Thanks again BetterRed. One question I do have: With your library of over 20,000 publications, do you find any performace problems when scrolling through Calibre? Or when sorting or filtering? Or does everything perform really well at that level?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Forester1

Thanks again BetterRed. One question I do have: With your library of over 20,000 publications, do you find any performace problems when scrolling through Calibre? Or when sorting or filtering? Or does everything perform really well at that level?

Scrolling uses ONLY the DB.
I use the 'Page Down' key. With 28 lines showing, about 4 seconds per page . XP on a P4 3.2
With 'Details' Showing, 22 Lines : 2 seconds per page

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Forester1

Thanks again BetterRed. One question I do have: With your library of over 20,000 publications, do you find any performance problems when scrolling through Calibre? Or when sorting or filtering? Or does everything perform really well at that level?

No problems at all - providing I don't Search 20,000 on Comments or Sort 20,000 on Formats, even then its only 100 secs rather than the normal 1 sec.

My only performance niggle is that the scroll bar on the main book list doesn't operate as smoothly as I'd like - eg like a excel spreadsheet with a similar number of rows, but that's as true with 1,000 books as it is with 20,000. I suspect it's a function of the GUI library rather than the database. I have another sqllite database application with about 8000 rows, it scrolls smoothly, but it won't run on Mac or Linux.

I reckon it would take 10 minutes to define a genre column in each of your libraries; set the genre value of all the books in each library to the library name (Mystery, Romance, Fantasy etc); create a new library with the genre column; copy all the books from each existing library into the new one. Then spend 30 minutes 'playing' with the combined library, if you don't like it then undo what you just did - remove the combined library, remove the genre column from your existing libraries, and carry on as if nothing happened.

Which is about as long as it took me to type this reply, because my mouse died and I had to walk down the street to buy it a new battery

BR

Addenda - maybe the 'bumpy' scrolling in the book details 'window' is not caused by the GUI library, because I just noticed the Calibre Book reader is much 'smoother' - whatever - its only a niggle, not even an annoyance.

[kovidgoyal]

If by scrolling you mean moving through the book list one at a time, then it is slow because the book details have to be rendered, the cover browser updated etc,

If you mean just scrolling the book list without changing the current book, it can be a little slow because the book list dynamically loads data as you scroll (i.e. the list of rows is not pre-rendered). This is a scroll performance/memory usage/startup time tradeoff.

[BetterRed]

@kovidgoyal - I was thinking of when one drags the button up/down in the scroll bar on large lists, my perception is that I'm pulling it down or pushing it up through treacle.

Don't worry about it, I could be the 1 person in 15,000,000 who has this perception.

cheers BR