Show HN: Leaves – A text-UI disk usage treemap visualizer

github.com

45 points by patonw 5 hours ago

GUI disk analyzers are great for figuring out what's filling up your laptop/desktop drive.

On containers or remote servers, the options are limited to purely text based utilities (e.g. du) or list-centric TUIs (e.g. ncdu) which are usually limited to viewing one directory at a time.

I created leaves to fill that gap.

Inspired by classic utilities like WinDirStat and KDirStat, it uses a 2-dimensional treemap^1 visualization to show the entire directory hierarchy with proportionally sized rectangles.

It's performant enough to handle millions of files, thanks to Rust and multi-threading. However, block characters aren't as suited as pixels for resolving a large number of items. Leaves can show file-type summaries per directory or partition the top-level directories by extension, allowing you to see not only where space is being used, but also how.

For instance, I can see the largest chunk of my home directory is taken up by uv caches for python and old Linux ISOs that I could easily re-download if needed. Or in a particular container, +600MB is used by standard Rust documentation and tutorials, and that it is the only location with HTML/JS files, when only the libraries and build tools are needed (note to self: remember to use the minimal profile next time).

^1: https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/doc/Tree...

1970-01-01 - an hour ago

This is the kind of tool that should be baked into the kernel. It's never there when you need it, and when you do need it, it is probably already a full disk and you maybe can't just download it.

KaiserPro - an hour ago

Ooo a TUI version of Sequoia view: https://sequoiaview.win.tue.nl/ nice

ktm5j - 2 hours ago

This is super cool, I've always used ncdu for this kinda thing but I like this a lot better. Thanks for sharing!

douglee650 - 39 minutes ago

Is this faster than diskx inventory or other gui tools?

bescob_ar - 4 hours ago

This looks fantastic, reminds me a lot of SpaceSniffer. The focus view or allowing for navigation through chunks is a nice essential inclusion. One desire might be quick actions. Doing size of squares based on the # of packages a dependency installation causes: Helps I guess users hellbent on having their install minimal figure out what they can afford to remove for as few packages on their system as reasonably possible.

rrauenza - 2 hours ago

I had just been looking for a windirstat like tool for linux the other day.

What I really also want is a way to do an offline index that this reads ... I ended up using duc. Maybe I will fork and add it!

thanks for sharing!

sghiassy - 3 hours ago

Really cool.

If possible, being able to “brew install” on a Mac would be killer

azeirah - 2 hours ago

Love it! If this works well I'm going to add it to my basic linux tools toolkit next to htop and the like.

takencoder - 2 hours ago

Nice! The file-type extension partitioning feature is a really smart addition to handle the limitations of block characters.

robertclaus - 3 hours ago

Ooh, this is nice. I loved windirstat back in the day.

gorkemyildirim - 2 hours ago

[flagged]