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Comment by robocat | Hacker News Reader

> but I don't like how unintuitive the readout is

The best disk usage UI I ever saw was this one: https://www.trishtech.com/2013/10/scanner-display-hard-disk-... The inner circle is the top level directories, and each ring outwards is one level deeper in the directory heirarchy. You would mouse over large subdirectories to see what they were, or double click to drilldown into a subdirectory. Download it and try it - it is quite spectacularly useful on Windows (although I'm not sure how well it handles Terabyte size drives - I haven't used Windows for a long time).

Hard to do a circular graph in a terminal...

It is very similar to a flame graph? Perhaps look at how flame graphs are drawn by other terminal performance tools.

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I've used graphical tools very similar to this, and I always come back to this:

   du -h | sort -rh | less

(might have to sudo that du depending on current folder. on macos, use gsort)

You just immediately see exactly what you need to delete, and you can so quickly scan the list. I'm not a terminal die-hard "use it for everything" kinda guy, I like GUIs for lots of stuff. But when it comes to "what's taking up all my space?" this is honestly the best solution I've found.

I like to use:

    du -shx \*

I used to pipe that to:

    | grep G

to find anything gig sized, but I like your:

    | sort -rh

Thanks!

Good tip! Yeah, the `sort -rh` is what makes it sing, it's such a cool feature of coreutils that `sort` knows how to sort human-readable output from `du` or `df`

"Disk Usage Analyser" / "Baobab" on Linux is awesome with the same UI: https://apps.gnome.org/en-GB/Baobab/

Also Filelight (KDE)

And Filelight from KDE - https://apps.kde.org/filelight/

I don't like radial charts because the outer rings have a larger area, which makes it look like files deep in the hierarchy take more space than in reality. And also it leaves the majority of screen space unused.

I prefer the more classic treemap view, my personal favorite being the classic version of SpaceMonger but it's Windows only and very slow.

WizTree also uses a treemap view and is very fast. It's also Windows-only though.

Linux and MacOS have QDirStat: https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat

Thank you for this, I've always looked for a WinDirStat alternative for Linux.

DaisyDisk on mac does that. Also it's blazing fast, it seems to even beat "du" so I don't know what tricks they're pulling.

I think they're reading some of the info from Spotlight metadata already collected by the OS for indexing, but I could be wrong.

That’s probably it. It’s likely powered by whatever thing gives you quick directory sizes in Finder after you do View Options (cmd+j), and select “Show All Sizes”. I have that setting always on for all directories and pretty sure it’s cached as it’s fast.

That’s called a ring chart or a sunburst chart.

duc http://duc.zevv.nl/ does this

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