Hi all,
calibre 6 is ready for Beta testing. The headline feature is Full text search, which means you can search the full text of all book files in your library from within calibre. Simply click the FT button at the left of the calibre search bar. calibre will first need to index the books in your library, a one time process, and then you can search for any word or combination of words in your entire library.
Once you turn on indexing for a library, any future books added to it will be automatically indexed in the background. Note that currently full text searching is not possible through the content server interface, that will likely be implemented later. Testing and feedback on the new Full text search is most welcome.
The other major changes are:
1) Moving to Qt 6 from Qt 5. This should have no user visible changes, except that there may be a few third party plugins that have not yet been ported to support Qt 6
2) Dropping support for 32-bit builds (because Qt 6 does not support them). In particular on Windows, the calibre installer will now automatically uninstall calibre 32bit and replace it with calibre 64bit.
3) Support for the ARM64 CPU architecture on Linux and Apple Silicon on macOS.
4) You can now specify different icon themes for light and dark mode
The betas are fully compatible with calibre 5 you can run both on the same library with no ill effects. calibre 5 will simply ignore the full text search data calibre 6 generates. The only caveat is that if you add books using calibre 5 they will not be automatically indexed, so you might have to periodically re-index the library if you regularly use both 5 and 6 on the same library.
You can download the betas from:
https://download.calibre-ebook.com/betas/
For users running from source, use the qt6 branch with the beta builds, and master with regular calibre 5 builds.
Enjoy and thank you for helping to iron out the bugs of which I am sure there will be several since FTS is a fairly large feature, code wise.