Ncdu: An Updated Fork | Hacker News Reader

Ncdu: An Updated Fork

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22 pointsrcalixte15 comments

I have personally moved to gdu (https://github.com/dundee/gdu) as I found it to be way faster than ncdu (I haven't checked the fork but I don't expect it to improve that much).

1 minute vs 1 second for my entire / which includes mounts to NFS shares (used 1.4 TiB on host SSD, 14 TiB on NFS HDDs and 3 TiB on NFS SSD).

Could you do me a favor and test with

   ncdu -t32

this uses 32 threads and should be much faster. I think only reason this isn't default is to be a friendly tool on your host.

It's been going for 5 minutes already… I can't be bothered to let it run longer.

Seems to be wasting a lot of time scanning `/run/user/1000/doc` from Flatpak.

If you use `-x` you'll stay on the same filesystem (so not needlessly check tmpfs or other special filesystems)

So that will exclude other partitions mounted which is e.g. completely useless on my storage server. This and having to remember to use flags or I could just use `gdu` which just works.

Thanks for the tip! Stopped me from installing yet another thing.

This project carries significance for me, not only as a learning resource but also for future projects which is why I've forked and will aim to maintain it for the foreseeable future. I'm still getting familiar with the codebase beyond what was required to update it so any potential issues will be handled on a best-effort basis. I didn't see any actionable issues in the issue tracker but that doesn't mean there aren't things that can be implemented or improved upon. I aim to implement some form of CI/CD at some point as well.

Big thanks to you too for maintaining his legacy,

> This project carries significance for me

Same

> I aim to implement some form of CI/CD at some point as well.

Please feel free to cherry-pick whatever you need from my fork:

* https://github.com/BratishkaErik/ncdu

I have moved "static release" logic from Makefile to "build.zig", but the idea should be generally same and easily transferrable to your fork. There was also some other fork on Github which had more tests like integrations etc, but I lost it.

Also, I added your repository to the list of known forks, and tried to write some preliminary recollection/comparison of all 3 versions, if you want you can check it at https://code.blicky.net/yorhel/ncdu/issues/279

Also, I want to know what you meant by this:

> https://lobste.rs/s/dsoh2w/ncdu_ncurses_disk_usage_updated_f... > I don't want to put down someone else's efforts or project. As I stated in another reply in this thread, there are some decisions that were made that I would not have and will not make.

I don't have accounts on Lobste.rs, and I thought it would be sort-of rude to ask this on Github Issues, so I'm asking here... sorry if it bothers you

> I don't have accounts on Lobste.rs, and I thought it would be sort-of rude to ask this on Github Issues, so I'm asking here... sorry if it bothers you

Sorry if this came off poorly. You documented most of the differences here: https://code.blicky.net/yorhel/ncdu/issues/279

Ultimately, I won't make some of the same decisions regarding the build system and a few other changes. I feel like we have a small community of folks who cared actively about this project so I think having alternative options is a good thing! I have some ideas that might make building easier but I am also not keen on adding an external dependency unless it is strictly required but I don't think I'll be making substantial changes to the build system otherwise.

what's the difference between this and BratishkaErik's version [1] which i believe is used by fedora[2] today?

[1] https://github.com/BratishkaErik/ncdu

[2] https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/ncdu/ncdu/

It's a fork of this, check the commit history lol. Appears they forked in April

It's not, this is a new independent fork from original upstream. If you refer to my commits in his fork from March of 2025, they are also from the original upstream: https://code.blicky.net/yorhel/ncdu/pulls?q=&type=pr&state=a...

I don't get it, why don't people put a simple screenshot in the README? I don't have time to figure out what your repo does and how it works.

The correct link should be rather this post directly, than repo.

https://dev.yorhel.nl/doc/ncdu2

Post actually explains what's going on.

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