zaldih

Hi HN! I'm the creator of npkill, a small terminal UI (TUI) tool that helps developers find and delete large, old `node_modules` folders.

With version 1.0 around the corner, we're rethinking the direction of the project: should we stay true to its roots, or evolve into something broader?

In this post, I reflect on whether npkill should expand to support other ecosystems—like Rust, Python, Java, and more—through predefined "profiles" that target common junk files in those stacks.

We'd love to hear what the community thinks—whether you're already using npkill, or work in a different stack and wish something like it existed for your environment.

Thanks for reading, and I really appreciate your feedback! Lets start a discussion.

Thank you very much for your comments guys! I am definitely learning a lot.

I was encouraged to write the post just in case someone happened to have the same problem, hopefully ended up on the site and could find some light here.

Now thanks to you I realise that I made the mistake of using getDisplayLanguage() instead of getLanguage(). The former returns the text of the language. The second one returns the universal code of the language.

As I said at the end, I'm not an Android developer and I guess in my haste and tiredness I settled for the first thing that seemed to work without much thought to good practice or whether I was actually getting the language code or not. A very silly bug but as it worked most of the time for some reason, it was almost impossible to find the first time. And of course, snipped was a simplification of a more complex system with persistence handling and so on, which made it not so obvious.

I certainly think all of us here won't make this mistake in the future :)

I initially created Npkill (https://npkill.js.org) for my own use because as a web developer I was always running out of disk space. When we launched it quickly became popular because it seems that not only we had that problem and today it is the most popular tool for that purpose.

Another one I launched was Pill Reminder (https://zaldih.github.io/pill-reminder/). If you are taking something for a cold or medical treatment it allows you to easily swipe and note down when you have taken your medication and lets you know when you are due to take it next.

ScrollTabs (https://github.com/zaldih/scrolltabs-extension) was born so soon after I migrated from chrome to firefox years ago and I missed being able to switch between tabs with the mouse scroll.

+ many others that I would like to prepare and make public for the future.