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Show HN: Fclones-GUI – a fast duplicate file finder with GTK4 interface (github.com)

4 points by pkolaczk ↗ HN
Some time ago, as an exercise in writing parallel Rust, I created fclones [1] - a command line utility to find and remove duplicate files. It was fun to develop, and soon it became quite advanced. It's probably also one of the most efficient duplicate finders available - some users reported using it for cleaning terabytes of data.

But, being a CLI app, it probably doesn't offer the best possible user experience for those who want an easy to use program.

In particular, the typical workflow of finding duplicates and then picking some of them to remove is hard to execute smoothly in a batch-oriented program.

Hence, I thought a GUI would be a nice improvement. And here it is! An old-school desktop app. In GTK+. Some say I'm crazy to do this in 2023.

It doesn't offer all the functionality available in its CLI cousin yet, but it already does the job: it finds duplicates and can remove the selected ones. It also shares the majority of code with CLI fclones, so it is also quite fast.

This is obviously a very early version. Let me know if you like it and which features you'd like to see next.

3 comments

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JeremyBarbosa
This is great to see!

I recently had many issues with MacOS's Photos export option having no resume feature, so fclones was very helpful for deleting the hundreds of gigabytes of duplicates I had made trying to get all my photos.

The dev of fclones making the gui also gives a lot of hope for its quality. The fclones CLI is so ergonomic that it is easy to remember all the commands even with occasional use.

Do you have any plans on adding the gui to FlatHub as well? That would be nice for using it on Debian more easily.

pkolaczk
> Do you have any plans on adding the gui to FlatHub as well?

Yup, why not. I just need to learn how to do it first. :)

jiripospisil
Nice! I've been using the command line version since very early days and this is a welcome addition. I've packaged it for AUR (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/fclones-gui).

> Let me know if you like it and which features you'd like to see next.

The ability to cancel an ongoing search for duplicates.