A fast, native comic reader for your desktop — that also tells you which issues you're missing.
Most desktop CBZ/CBR readers either haven't been touched in a decade, or they're a server you have to host and open in a browser. This one is a normal desktop app: you install it, point it at a folder, and read.
And it does one thing the others don't — it looks at what you actually own and tells you what's missing from a series:
Saga · Image Comics You have 6 of 12 — Missing: 4, 6–7, 10–12
No account, no server, no cloud. It reads the ComicInfo.xml that most comics
already carry inside the archive, and falls back to reading the filenames when
they don't.
- CBZ and CBR, with natural page ordering (
page2beforepage10). - Browse by folders. Pick a root folder and navigate it — your library is not flattened into one endless grid.
- Collection tracking. See which issues of a series you're missing, from metadata embedded in your files. Optionally connect to Metron, an open community comic database, to fill in the total issue count.
- Reader with zoom (100–400%), keyboard navigation, and vertical scrolling that turns the page when you reach the bottom.
- Read tracking. Comics are marked as read when you finish them, or by hand. Mark a whole folder at once.
- Custom folder covers — drop a
cover.jpgin a folder, or set one from the app. - Multiple libraries, switchable from a dropdown.
- Fast with big libraries. The grid appears instantly whether you have ten comics or ten thousand; covers load only for what's on screen and are cached.
- Small. A few MB, not the few hundred an Electron app would cost you.
- Updates itself, with signed releases.
Grab the installer from the latest release:
| Platform | File |
|---|---|
| Windows | readingcomics_x.y.z_x64-setup.exe or .msi |
| Linux | .AppImage, .deb or .rpm |
Windows will warn you that it doesn't recognise the app. That's because the installer isn't signed with a paid code-signing certificate — not because anything is wrong with it. Click More info → Run anyway. Every release is built in the open by GitHub Actions and cryptographically signed for the updater; you can check the workflow yourself.
You'll need Rust, Node.js
and pnpm. On Linux you also need the usual Tauri dependencies plus
libsecret-1-dev.
git clone https://github.com/DarioRQ/readingcomics.git
cd readingcomics
pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev # run it
pnpm tauri build # build an installerThe backend is Rust: it reads the archives, generates cover thumbnails, and caches them on disk keyed by path + size + modification time, so revisiting a folder never re-opens a single file. The frontend is React, and it only asks for the covers of cards that are actually on screen.
Library browsing is confined to the root folder you pick — paths are canonicalised and checked, and symlinks are not followed.
Anything you connect to is opt-in. Without a Metron account configured, the app makes no network requests at all except checking for its own updates.
Issues and pull requests are welcome. If you hit a comic that won't open, please open an issue with the error the app shows — that message is there specifically to make those reports possible.
MIT — see LICENSE.
.cbr support uses the unrar crate, which
builds the UnRAR source (freeware licence, free to use for extraction, not
OSI-approved). Everything else is MIT.
The bundled typefaces — Archivo and
Fraunces — are under the SIL Open
Font Licence 1.1; their licence texts ship next to the font files in
src/assets/fonts/. They are packaged with the app rather than fetched from a
CDN, so the reader keeps working offline and asks nobody for anything on start.