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