HN Explorer

Show HN: Leaves – A text-UI disk usage treemap visualizer (github.com)

93 points by patonw ↗ HN
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...

29 comments

[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 43.8 ms ] thread
bescob_ar
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.
robertclaus
Ooh, this is nice. I loved windirstat back in the day.
sghiassy
Really cool.

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

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

azeirah
Love it! If this works well I'm going to add it to my basic linux tools toolkit next to htop and the like.
ktm5j
This is super cool, I've always used ncdu for this kinda thing but I like this a lot better. Thanks for sharing!
1970-01-01
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.
Modified3019
Had this happen to me just last week. Had forgotten to change the “to download into” directory in an GOG archive script after migration to a new system. Filled a folder on the system disk instead of my intended ZFS array.

Naturally ncdu wasn’t installed, so it took me a bit to figure out what the heck happened.

It’s interesting and ironic how so many things in proxmox that would normally release space, instead become nonfunctional when the disk is full. Things like deleting old VM disks or cached iso’s will fail via the interface. I think the web console also broke, had to ssh in to manually free space up.

sandreas
On ZFS it often is old snapshots and it is surprisingly hard to find out how much space will be freed after destroying one.

I found out that 'zfs destroy' has a dry-run option along with one that can show reclaimed space. After this i hacked together a little cli tool [1] that calculates what snapshots need to be deleted to reclaim e.g. 10GB.

It's not really production ready but from time to time it's useful :-)

1: https://github.com/sandreas/zfs-tool

douglee650
Is this faster than diskx inventory or other gui tools?
vadansky
Surprised no one mentioned WizTree which is a lot faster than WinDirStat
password4321
WizTree is no longer free for commercial use; bummer because it's really fast for NTFS.
dbdoskey
There is also dua-cli or mcdu, if someone prefers a ncdu-style disk usage visualizer.
patonw
Nice!

I might borrow a little from that CI workflow for cross-compilation.

antihero
Broot (br -w) can also do this (not with the big rectangles)
xp84
Love this! A few similar GUI apps have been mentioned for Windows. For Mac, I've been using GrandPerspective for probably 15 years. This is one of my favorite class of programs in terms of how uniquely useful they are.

A pity we can't use something like this (and actually take action on the results) on closed systems like iOS (I've just had to factory reset my iphone to rein in a 37GB "system data" mess... even on the newly restored phone that consumes 15GB but at least that's better).

dunham
That looks like a nice tool. It would be helpful if it could optionally run off of a data file. I've used "ncdu" to visualize my restic backups by writing a script that generates the ncdu data format, and more recently I've abused ncdu to visualize process memory usage on macos:

https://gist.github.com/dunhamsteve/59f5e6b9a4bc69039853674d...

patonw
I'm planning on implementing persistence in the near future, likely using some kind of generic embedded database or KV store rather than a serialization format. The primary goal would be to enable resummarization without rescanning directories and consequently, real-time updates from file notifications. However, I don't want to force persistence, since one use case for this tool is answering "why is my laptop hard drive completely full!?!?".

re: memory usage, because of the price of RAM these days, my original plan was for a hierarchical memory usage analyzer, but attribution of shared libraries on Linux isn't straightforward.

"Real" memory usage is unfortunately ill-defined since it could mean "memory freed by killing a process", "memory allocated specifically to the process", "proportional of system memory shared by other processes", etc.

Such a tool would likely need multiple subcommands to reflect how the user's intent, along with an extensive README to explain the subtleties.

To illustrate, if we only show the proportional set size in a hierarchy (e.g. IDE with LSP... I'm looking at you rust-analyzer!), but the user wants to know how much memory could be reclaimed by killing the parent process, two things could happen, as far as I understand. If it's the only hierarchy using a large chunk of shared libraries, the PSS will be pretty close. However, if other apps are using those libraries, very little memory will be freed (mostly what was allocated specifically to the killed app).

On top of that, we also have to consider swap space.

I may revisit this in the future once I have a better understanding of smaps and friends, if RAM prices don't normalize anytime soon.

joshka
Ratatui maintainer here. Looks great!

I've had on my someday bucket list doing up a web based version of daisy disk as a docker image I can slap on my various servers, but this is probably just as good an approach. I like it.

valerie4929
I use windirstat often, and this looks like an even better version of that, pretty cool.
mune2gu-chan
Great to see another local-first visualization tool. I'm constantly cleaning up old files just to free up space, so I really appreciate how simple and focused this looks.
sleetdrop
I’ve been using ncdu and WinDirStat for years. This looks awesome. One feature I’d love to see is exporting the results as HTML+SVG reports. I maintain a shared server, and it’s often useful to share a report with the team to figure out who’s using up the disk space.
dmrivers
I found the bottom-right corner of things in my home dir I had no idea about was the lowest hanging fruit. I think this is because my typical cleaning routine was either A. to have claude code find big files I could delete or B. du -sh -- *, which is too slow on ~. Thanks for the decluttering!