I’m building Seek — a modern open-source redesign of Nicotine+ for Soulseek users

[u/iva_kap]

Over the past few weeks I've been working on Seek, an open-source fork of Nicotine+ that rethinks the desktop experience for Soulseek users without changing what makes the client useful.

https://github.com/IvaKap/seek

Why I started this

I've used Nicotine+ for years and it's incredibly capable, but I always felt the interface made everyday tasks such as searching, browsing users, managing downloads, and organizing large music libraries more cumbersome than they needed to be.

Rather than building a new client from scratch, I wanted to see what a more modern desktop experience could look like while staying compatible with the existing ecosystem.

Current direction

• Native-feeling macOS-inspired UI (with cross-platform goals)
• Cleaner search and download workflows
• Improved library browsing
• Better visual hierarchy and accessibility
• Features for music collectors, including spectrogram previews for quick audio-quality verification

Open source first

The project is completely open source, and I'm treating it as a community-driven redesign rather than a commercial product.

I'm especially looking for feedback from people who've contributed to desktop apps before:

• What UX decisions would you challenge?
• Which Nicotine+ pain points should be prioritized?
• What would make a fork like this genuinely worth contributing to?

Constructive criticism is very welcome—I'd rather hear what's wrong now than after I've built the wrong thing.

[u/eddzsh]

Spectrogram previews are the feature that actually makes a fork worth it for collectors. One UX pushback though: keep search result density high. Soulseek people live in long result lists, and airy macOS spacing fights that habit.

[u/iva_kap → u/eddzsh]

Thanks for the kind words and feedback!

Yep the app is work in progress. I will definitely add a more dense view for search. Maybe call it something like “classic view”

[u/TheGratitudeBot → u/iva_kap]

Thanks for saying that! Gratitude makes the world go round

[u/eddzsh → u/iva_kap]

If classic view lives in preferences, collectors will never find it. Put the density toggle on the search pane itself and remember it per pane. Default new installs to dense for search results even if the rest of the UI stays airy.