tobi/disktree

Find what is filling a disk, mark what should go, and remove it — with the volume's free space in view the whole time.

disktree is a treemap for Omarchy. It scans your home directory by default, draws every directory as a nested mosaic sized by what it really costs on disk, and lets you walk into it with the keyboard or the mouse. Mark as much as you like; nothing happens until you review the list and commit, and the permanent path always asks first.

Built with GPUI through gpui-omarchy, so it follows your Omarchy theme and behaves like the rest of the desktop.

Download disktree-*-x86_64-linux.tar.gz (aarch64-linux on ARM) from the latest release, unpack it, and run ./install.sh inside (or just copy disktree onto your PATH). Or build it:

git clone https://github.com/tobi/disktree
cd disktree
make install

make install builds a release binary and puts three things under ~/.local (no root needed):

• ~/.local/bin/disktree
• a desktop entry, so disktree is in the launcher and in a file manager's Open with for a directory (it adds a handler; it never becomes the default)
• an icon

sudo make install PREFIX=/usr/local installs system-wide; make uninstall removes exactly what was installed.

On Arch, including Omarchy, disktree is in the AUR: disktree builds each release from source, and disktree-bin installs the release binary:

yay -S disktree-bin

You need Rust 1.97 or newer and a Wayland or X11 session with a GPU that GPUI can drive (Vulkan). Distributions often package an older Rust; rustup installs a current one. The repo pins 1.97 in rust-toolchain.toml, so with rustup the right toolchain is fetched on the first build even if rustup default points at something older.

Download disktree-*-aarch64-macos.zip (x86_64-macos for an Intel Mac) from the latest release, unzip it, and drag disktree.app into Applications. macOS 11 or newer.

A release that was not signed and notarized is stopped by Gatekeeper: macOS says it "is damaged and can't be opened" or "cannot be verified". The app is fine; the browser marked the download as quarantined. Clear the mark once:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/disktree.app

(Or open it once, then choose Open Anyway in System Settings › Privacy & Security.)

Or build it, with Rust 1.97 or newer and Xcode or its Command Line Tools. macOS does not come with Rust; install it with rustup.

make install     # ~/Applications/disktree.app, and ~/.local/bin/disktree
make uninstall

To see everything, give disktree Full Disk Access in System Settings › Privacy & Security (the panel offers a button when it is missing), then reopen it. Without it macOS hides Mail, Messages, Safari, other apps' data and the Trash, and disktree counts them as unreadable. Started from a terminal, it is the terminal that needs the access. macOS also asks once each for Desktop, Documents and Downloads.

What is different from Linux:

• Free space is what df reports. Finder's figure is larger: it counts purgeable space (caches and local snapshots macOS will clear on its own).
• Cloned files (copies APFS shares blocks between, as Finder's Duplicate makes) are each counted in full, so a total can exceed what deleting them frees.
• Time Machine's local snapshots are not files and do not appear; they are part of the gap between the scan and the disk's used space.
• Cloud-only folders (iCloud Drive, Dropbox and the like, evicted to the server) are not opened, so a scan never downloads them.

To sign and notarize a build for others, with a Developer ID certificate in the keychain and credentials saved by xcrun notarytool store-credentials:

NOTARY_PROFILE=<profile> cargo xtask bundle \
  --sign "Developer ID Application: Name (TEAMID)" --notarize

On Windows 10 or 11, download disktree-*-x86_64-windows.zip (aarch64-windows on ARM) from the same release, unpack it anywhere and run disktree.exe. Or build it with Rust 1.97 or newer, from rustup, and the MSVC toolchain (Visual Studio Build Tools, C++ workload):

git clone https://github.com/tobi/disktree
cd disktree
cargo build --release    # target\release\disktree.exe

See On Windows for what differs there.

disktree            # scan the home directory
disktree --disk     # the whole disk it lives on
disktree ~/src      # or any directory
disktree --help     # options: apparent size, follow links, skip hidden, …

• Top: the trail from /, then what is measured — Size, Files or Age, Hidden files, Apparent size, and the depth drawn. In the tree a crumb goes there, and its ▾ lists its siblings, largest first with their share and size, to jump sideways (arrows and Enter work too). Above the scanned root a crumb is dimmer, and clicking it widens the scan to there (see below).
• Under it: the scan totals, the filter when one is typed, and the legend.
• Mosaic: colour is the kind of data — code, agent scratch, toolchains, synced files, git, media, documents, caches — at one muted level, lighter with depth. A diagonal hatch is space that can be had back (caches, sync history, package stores, build output), independent of colour. Top-level directories carry a strip of their colour and a name band; deeper open directories a slim label row. In Age mode colour is the last write instead, from this week to older.
• Panel: the selection (its size set large, share of the scan, files, last write, and for a checkout what git says — changes, stashes, unpushed commits); Worth a look, the largest things that could plausibly go; what is marked; and the disk, free now and after the marks, with the way to the review screen. Drag its left edge to resize it; double-click the edge to reset.

One colour is kept apart: amber marks the selection, the main action, and what can be had back.

The kinds come from directory names and a few shapes (a bare git repository, target beside a Cargo.toml). Some of the names are specific to one machine; see crates/disktree-core/src/classify.rs.

Space, X, Enter and the arrows act on the tile under the mouse if the mouse moved last, and on the keyboard selection after you use an arrow or Tab.

A marked tile takes the danger colour, and so does everything inside it: removing a directory takes its contents with it. Marking a directory absorbs any marks already inside it, and something inside a marked directory cannot be marked or kept on its own; its panel offers to unmark the directory instead. Marking is reversible — press it again — and the saving is never counted twice.

Scroll to magnify toward the pointer. The wheel magnifies until the directory under the pointer fills the view, and the next notch goes into it — one continuous motion, with the directory's contents growing into place. Scroll the other way to come back out. Enter goes into the selected directory at any depth, and Backspace or Escape goes up one level. < and >, beside the Size / Files / Age switch, go back and forward through the directories visited, as do alt ← alt → (also ⌘[ ⌘] on macOS) and the mouse's side buttons. + and - magnify without going in; 0 resets.

c (or Review…) opens the list of everything marked. Unmark anything there, then choose:

• Move to trash — the default when a trash is available. On macOS that is the system Trash, the same move as Finder's (on another disk, that disk's own Trash; network shares often have none). Elsewhere it is trash-put from trash-cli, then gio trash, then a built-in XDG trash. Recoverable until the trash is emptied, so it commits directly.
• Delete permanently — rm -rf semantics. It always asks first, in a dialog that names what goes and how much comes back.

When it finishes, disktree scans again so the numbers on screen match the disk, and shows how much free space was actually gained.

On macOS the menu bar also has ⌘⇧R to show the selection in Finder, ⌘R to rescan, ⌘[ and ⌘] for back and forward, and ⌘Q, ⌘H and ⌘W (closing the window quits); other ⌘ chords are left to the system. On Linux and Windows the same work with ctrl, with F5 to rescan too.

On the review screen: m trash, p permanent, ! unmark all, enter commits, esc goes back. Or hand the list on instead of acting on it: s saves it as a text file, one path per line, and a copies a prompt for a coding agent: free the space by removing what you picked, checking each path first (git work that exists nowhere else, a tool's own clean command) and touching nothing else. A name holding a newline is left out of the list and escaped in the prompt, so it cannot pass for another path.

• Disk usage by default: st_blocks × 512, the number du reports and the space that actually comes back when a file is deleted. Apparent size (what ls -l shows) is one toggle away.
• Hardlinks once. Two names for one inode cost one file.
• Hidden entries included, because ~/.cache is often the biggest thing in a home directory. Symlinks are not followed.
• The projection counts one volume. The meter shows the scanned volume's free space, so it adds up only the marks whose bytes come back to that volume, by the same rule the scan bounds the volume with. With -X, a mark on a disk mounted inside the tree, on a network share or in a snapshot subvolume is left out of the projection — removing it gives its space back somewhere else, or, in a snapshot, shares its blocks with the live files — and the panel and the review screen say what was left out. A mark whose volume cannot be told is not claimed either.

The scan follows dust's approach: one rayon scope per root, a completion counter per directory so no directory is built before its last subdirectory lands, and one bottom-up pass that aggregates sizes and removes duplicate hardlinks.

Press v (or click Volumes beside the disk name in the side panel) to bring up the volume picker. It lists every candidate volume mounted on the system together with its free space, ordered fullest first, filtering out pseudo-filesystems and duplicate btrfs/APFS mount points. Selecting any entry resets the scan root directly to that volume.

Click / (or any directory above the scanned root) in the trail, press g, run disktree --disk, or use the launcher's Scan the whole disk action. g and --disk scan the disk your home directory lives on — / on Omarchy and on macOS. On macOS the Data volume's second mount, /System/Volumes/Data, is skipped: it is /Users, /Applications and the rest again under other names.

Widening is memoized: the tree already measured is handed to the wider walk and reused where it is reached, so going from ~ to / reads only what is outside ~ (on this machine, seconds instead of a full rescan). The current view stays on screen until the wider tree lands, which then opens with the directory you came from selected. Going back down is just navigation.

A scan stays on one volume, and a volume is the mount source, not the device number: btrfs gives each subvolume its own st_dev, so /home, /var/log and /var/cache/pacman/pkg are included, while /proc, /sys, /run, tmpfs, /boot, other disks, network shares and automount points are left out (checked by path, so an automounted NAS is never mounted just to be measured). Snapshot subvolumes are left out too: their files share blocks with the live ones, and counting them would count the disk twice. -X crosses into everything: a mark that lands on another volume is still removed, but it is not added to the metered volume's free space.

Without root, some system directories cannot be read; they are counted as unreadable in the top bar rather than guessed at.

The same program, with Windows' answers to the questions above:

• Disk usage is the allocation NTFS reports for each file: whole clusters, less for a compressed or sparse file, nothing for one small enough to live in its file record. It arrives with the directory listing itself (FileIdExtdDirectoryInfo), so it costs no more than the walk. Hardlinks count once on NTFS.
• The whole disk is the drive your profile is on, usually C:\. A folder another volume is mounted on is a link, like a junction, and is not entered, so a scan stays on one volume; -l follows links, and with them mounted folders.
• Run as administrator and the whole disk is read from NTFS's master file table instead of walked, as WizTree does: one pass over the table in large reads. On a 4-million-file C:\ that took about 3.4 s against 11.2 s for WizTree and about 20 s for the walk. It also sees what the walk is refused, such as System Volume Information. It is used only for a whole NTFS drive, since a folder would still cost the whole table, and not with -l, whose links the table does not follow. disktree flushes the volume after its own removals so the rescan shows them; changes other programs made seconds before may not show yet. Started without admin rights, disktree walks as before. On a whole NTFS drive without -l, or once Windows refuses the walk a folder, the side panel offers Restart as Administrator, which reopens the same folder and options through the UAC prompt; during a widening scan, the wider folder being scanned.
• Move to trash is the Recycle Bin, through the shell, which asks before destroying anything it cannot recycle.
• Refused besides the rules below: Windows, Program Files and ProgramData, what Windows keeps at the top of its drive (System Volume Information, Recovery, Boot, and the page and hibernation files, which Settings turns off), any folder holding your profile, such as C:\Users, and every profile in the folder Windows keeps them in (C:\Users\*, Public and Default included), since an elevated disktree may run as another account and can reach them all. What is inside a profile can still be removed, as under your own. Names compare without regard to case, as Windows compares them.
• Hidden means a name starting with a dot, or the hidden attribute, so -H drops AppData as Explorer hides it.
• The theme follows Windows' light or dark setting, since there is no Omarchy theme to follow. It does on macOS too, and on GNOME and KDE.

The removal rules live in crates/disktree-core/src/removal.rs, and each one is tested:

• only paths under the scanned root can be removed;
• the filesystem root, the scanned root and your home directory are refused;
• a mount point is refused, and so is anything with a mount point inside it, since removing it would reach into another filesystem; permanent deletion also stops at a mount boundary rather than descending into one (a btrfs subvolume that is not mounted goes with its directory, as the scan shows it);
• a directory holding your home directory or a system tree is refused (on macOS /Users is on the same volume as /, and /opt holds /opt/homebrew);
• system trees (/usr, /etc, /boot, /var/lib, /nix/store, /gnu/store, Homebrew's prefix on macOS and Linux, …) are refused even where permissions would allow it: packages own them, and pacman, paccache or journalctl --vacuum are the tools;
• a symlink is unlinked, never followed;
• nothing is passed through a shell — a file called -rf is just a file;
• selecting a checkout never runs a program it names: git is asked with its fsmonitor, hooks and pager off, and a checkout that defines its own filter drivers is not asked for its status at all ("changes unknown").

Hyprland tiles new windows, so disktree opens into whatever tile it is given. It is designed for a roomy window; float it, or give it a rule. The window class is disktree.

windowrule = float, class:^(disktree)$
windowrule = size 1400 900, class:^(disktree)$

make run      # release build, scanning $HOME
make lint     # rustfmt --check, then clippy with every warning an error
make test     # scanner, layout and removal tests, plus window-harness tests
make ci       # lint, then test

The lint gate is strict on purpose: clippy::all and clippy::pedantic are errors, and every exception is written down with its reason in Cargo.toml. The window-harness tests draw real frames and press real keys — including one that marks a directory, confirms the deletion and checks that the files are gone while their neighbours are not.

The interface follows the GPUI Kit design guides: every size is on one rem scale so interface zoom keeps its proportions, primary is reserved for what Enter does, and the only question the app asks is the one it cannot take back.

MIT