Hacker News Reader

Comment by yaacov | Hacker News Reader

I discovered Omni yesterday when League of Legends dumped 20 gB of text logs on my brother’s old MacBook, eating up all available disk space and crashing it. He asked me for help. I didn’t know what was taking up all his disk space so I searched for a tool to help me and found OmniDiskSweeper. Unlike the MacOS builtin tools that try to hide the underlying file system, OmniDiskSweeper actually helped me understand the contents of the file system and discover what was eating up all the storage.

If anyone who worked on that project is reading this, thank you.

View on HN

IIRC, OmniDiskSweeper and OmniWeb are just things Ken and Tim (CEO and CTO) work on in their spare time, mostly because they enjoy hacking on that stuff. Not sure if they're on HN, but Ken (@kcase) will certainly respond if you tweet your thanks at him!

I'm partial to DaisyDisk for it's wonderful graphical view

Space gremlin is pretty awesome as well.

I've used Grand Perspective for this: http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

I like GrandPerspective too.

As a poor college student, I went for the cheapest storage option on my MacBook. Running OmniDiskSweeper every once allowed me to maximize the storage I did have.

I use WinDirStat for the same thing on windows. Lets you pick and then scan a drive and then gives you a graphical view where the bigger the file the larger its block is proportionally to the other files.

Not sure if WinDirStat got updated to use a different method by now, but a few years ago many people switched to WizTree [0] as it is almost instant thanks to reading the data differently.

[0]: https://antibody-software.com/web/software/software/wiztree-...

WinDirStat is still slow as shit. I use it weekly. haha

I use Directory Report on Windows. It is faster than WinDirStat

ncdu is also a nice (free) alternative and can be installed via Homebrew (brew install ncdu):

https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu

WinDirStat is similarly nice for those on Windows, or JDiskReport for cross-platform

dust (du + rust) [1] makes for a good oss alternative.

[1] https://github.com/bootandy/dust

Not in the same league UI wise

Reply on news.ycombinator.com