It's an awful program. I can't believe that one of the devs hasn't updated the GUI so that it doesn't look like a Windows 3.1 Borland application.

I can't help specifically with that issue, but I use calibreweb running on my server in a docker container just so I don't have to deal with calibre, I don't know if it's compatible with your usage case, but it handles searching and whatnot and looks a hell of a lot better.