Calibre fails to open after rebooting Macbook

[dewd]

I rebooted my Macbook today and after restarting, I can't get Calibre to open. I've tried from the Applications folder, from the dock icon, from Terminal, and by using the "open with..." command on a file. I get the splash screen which tells me that it's Loading books, then that it's Initializing user interface, then the splash screen disappears and Calibre...does nothing. It's not in the Activity Monitor and there's no dot beside the dock icon as there would be if the app was running.

All other apps seem to be working fine.

I've tried rebooting several times, running Disk Utility, updating Calibre (I was running a version from earlier this year but now, running the latest version, the result is the same - splash screens, then nothing).

I've had a look through the forums and tried various things that have been suggested to others with similar problems, but none of it has made a difference.

Help please?

[kovidgoyal]

Run

/Applications/calibre.app/Contents/MacOS/calibre-debug -g

in a terminal and post the output.

[dewd]

From Terminal:

Spoiler:

calibre 5.17 embedded-python: True is64bit: True
macOS-10.15.5-x86_64-i386-64bit Darwin ('64bit', '')
('Darwin', '19.5.0', 'Darwin Kernel Version 19.5.0: Tue May 26 20:41:44 PDT 2020; root:xnu-6153.121.2~2/RELEASE_X86_64')
Python 3.8.5
OSX: ('10.15.5', ('', '', ''), 'x86_64')
Interface language: None
Integration status: True
Failed to initialize plugin: '/Users/Debs/Library/Preferences/calibre/plugins/Goodreads_Rating.zip'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "calibre/customize/ui.py", line 741, in initialize_plugins
File "calibre/customize/ui.py", line 65, in load_plugin
File "calibre/customize/zipplugin.py", line 293, in load
File "importlib/__init__.py", line 127, in import_module
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1014, in _gcd_import
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 991, in _find_and_load
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 975, in _find_and_load_unlocked
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 671, in _load_unlocked
File "calibre/customize/zipplugin.py", line 185, in exec_module
File "calibre/customize/zipplugin.py", line 181, in get_code
File "calibre_plugins.goodreads_rating.__init__", line 29
version = (3, 0, 0 )
^
TabError: inconsistent use of tabs and spaces in indentation
Successfully initialized third party plugins: DeDRM (7, 1, 0) && Action Chains (1, 7, 2) && Annotations (1, 15, 0) && Count Pages (1, 11, 0) && Duplicates++ (2, 0, 2) && Favourites Menu (1, 0, 5) && Find Duplicates (1, 8, 5) && Goodreads (1, 5, 1) && Goodreads More Tags (1, 2, 1) && Goodreads Sync (1, 15, 1) && Import List (1, 5, 4) && Job Spy (1, 0, 190) && Quality Check (1, 11, 2) && Reading List (1, 7, 2) && Search The Internet (1, 8, 1) && User Category (1, 5, 5) && View Manager (1, 6, 0)
devicePixelRatio: 2.0
logicalDpi: 72.0 x 72.0
physicalDpi: 128.00000192236715 x 127.50000191485789
Using calibre Qt style: True
qt.qpa.fonts: Populating font family aliases took 398 ms. Replace uses of missing font family ".SF NS Text" with one that exists to avoid this cost.
[0.00] Starting up...
[0.02] Showing splash screen...
[0.32] splash screen shown
[0.32] Initializing db...
[2.01] db initialized
[2.01] Constructing main UI...
DEBUG: 0.0 Annotations plugin: Error loading libiMobileDevice. This hasn't worked for a while, and is blacklisted in calibre v3.
DEBUG: 0.0 Annotations plugin: Error is: No module named 'calibre.devices.idevice'
DEBUG: 0.0 Annotations::reader_app_support.py - loading translations
DEBUG: 0.0 Annotations::common_utils.py - loading translations
DEBUG: 0.0 Annotations::appearance.py - loading translations
DEBUG: 0.0 Annotations::config.py - loading translations
DEBUG: 0.0 Annotations::annotated_books.py - loading translations
DEBUG: 0.1 Annotations::action.py - loading translations
DEBUG: 0.0 Goodreads Sync::dialogs.py - loading translations
DEBUG: 0.0 GoodreadsSync::action.py - loading translations
libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile
libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile
libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile
libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile
libpng warning: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile
[4.30] main UI initialized...
[4.30] Hiding splash screen
[5.31] splash screen hidden

[kovidgoyal]

according to that it started up fine. Did you enable the system tray icon? Check in your system tray area at the top right of the screen for the calibre icon

[dewd]

There's nothing in the menu bar (is that what you mean? - I don't think Calibre ever shows up there) and the dock icon doesn't show the dot that indicates an app is running (and either clicking or right-clicking on it brings up the menu you'd expect for an app that isn't running). Also, nothing in Activity Monitor, or Expose View.

In case it's relevant (and I should have said earlier), I'm running Catalina on a 2020 Macbook Air.

[kovidgoyal]

yes the system tray on macs is the in the global menu bar, typically the top right area of the screen.

And after you run that calibre debug command does the terminal return to a prompt? If so what does

echo $?

output

[dewd]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

And after you run that calibre debug command does the terminal return to a prompt? If so what does

echo $?

output

Yes, it returns to a prompt, and the output is:

$

[kovidgoyal]

the output has to be a number echo $? means print the return code of the last process that exited.

[dewd]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

the output has to be a number echo $? means print the return code of the last process that exited.

Sorry, my mis-reading of what you typed. I missed the ? off the end.

Running echo $? gives:

0

(i.e. a zero)

I'm hoping that means more to you than it does to me!

[kovidgoyal]

It means that calibre-debug exit without any errors, which is pretty strange.

Try running

/Applications/calibre.app/Contents/MacOS/calibre --ignore-plugins

and if that also fails try

CALIBRE_CONFIG_DIRECTORY=/tmp/cal /Applications/calibre.app/Contents/MacOS/calibre-debug -g

which will run calibre with an empty configuration and no plugins

[dewd]

/Applications/calibre.app/Contents/MacOS/calibre --ignore-plugins

gives:

Spoiler:

qt.qpa.fonts: Populating font family aliases took 409 ms. Replace uses of missing font family ".SF NS Text" with one that exists to avoid this cost.
Integration status: True
Failed to initialize plugin: '/Users/Debs/Library/Preferences/calibre/plugins/Goodreads_Rating.zip'

CALIBRE_CONFIG_DIRECTORY=/tmp/cal /Applications/calibre.app/Contents/MacOS/calibre-debug -g

does open Calibre, though obviously without the configuration changes I've made. So what do I do next? (This is where I'm hoping you give me a magic key to fix my own installation/configuration!)

Thank you so much for all your help so far, by the way.

[kovidgoyal]

Sadly there is no magic bullet. First remove the plugins sub directory from the config directory and see if that works, if not then try removing the files gui.py.json and gui.json and dynamic.pickle.json

[dewd]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Sadly there is no magic bullet. First remove the plugins sub directory from the config directory and see if that works, if not then try removing the files gui.py.json and gui.json and dynamic.pickle.json

Removing the plugins directory didn't work. Removing those three json files did, and I wondered if removing one at a time might work, so I replaced them and removed the first - gui.py.json - and that allowed Calibre to open with almost everything back the way it was. The only change to my previous set-up that I can see* is that the book details pane showed up on the right rather than the bottom and that's an easy fix.

*There might well be other changes that I'll come across as I work - it's only been five minutes! - but all the things that would have taken a long time to re-do - plugins and their configurations, general preferences, conversion options, toolbars, etc - seem to be back in place as they were before.

If you've any ideas about what might have caused the problem to happen (and thus what I or others might need to be cautious about in future), I'd be happy to hear them. But even if not, I want to express that I'm hugely grateful for your help here (on this thread and on the forums overall and more generally as the developer). I would not have been able to work through this on my own, and google wasn't really helping - and I use Calibre a *lot*, so, again, thank you!

[kovidgoyal]

You are welcome and no I dont have any ideas what could have caused it, sorry. never actually heard of this happening, i.e. calibre exiting with no errors by itself. If you are willing you can post the gui.py.json file and I will see if I can find anything suspicuous in it, but be aware it has possibly sensitive data.

[maddz]

I was getting a similar issue with Calibre on my Macbook (3.48 on High Sierra), and I found it was an issue if I tried starting up Calibre with other volumes attached. Another issue was if I had ADE 2.0 running at the same time.