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How can you mention those tools without also noting their most famous on-screen appearance: the "hacking" scene from Jurassic Park :-) This is almost the oppos

How can you mention those tools without also noting their most famous on-screen appearance: the "hacking" scene from Jurassic Park :-) This is almost the opposite of what you're asking for, but I am reminded of a rather more 2D version of these tools for finding what is using up space on your hard drive: the very excellent SpaceSniffer [1], which is sadly only for Windows. [1] http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/ http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/

cesarb 8y ago
That tool reminds me of KDirStat (http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/ http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/).
- quietbritishjim 8y ago
  That looks promising; pity it doesn't put the file/directory name in the graph. It looks like KDirStat and its successor QDirStat have a split pane view, with file names at the top and anonymous rectangles representing file sizes at the button. It's hard to express how much more effective it is to see all the information in one visualisation. It sounds like a small thing but it's really the whole point of the tool. The are issues about it in the QDirStat repo. The author has two objections: The first is that it would look ugly. That's pretty silly: obviously function is more important than looks when I'm tracking down disc space usage. Their other objection is that in Linux you have such a wide directory structure that all the labels would be uselessly crushed into tiny boxes anyway. That also doesn't make much sense to me; even if you have a lot of directories in your tour directory, usually there's only one or two containing the vast majority of disc usage (that's why the tool's useful on the first place!) so their labels will be clear, and if the others aren't then I don't care because I'm not interested in then in the first place. Perhaps the real problem is that QDirStat doesn't have the ability zoom in and out, and to increase and decrease the visibility depth, that SpaceSniffer does, which is also needed to make labels useful. Sorry, I didn't mean for that to turn into an essay!
dilap 8y ago
On the mac there is DaisyDisk
pault 8y ago
I've been using Disk Inventory X [0] for years. It's free and it works great! [0] http://www.derlien.com/ http://www.derlien.com/

cesarb 8y ago

That tool reminds me of KDirStat (http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/ http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/).

quietbritishjim 8y ago
That looks promising; pity it doesn't put the file/directory name in the graph. It looks like KDirStat and its successor QDirStat have a split pane view, with file names at the top and anonymous rectangles representing file sizes at the button. It's hard to express how much more effective it is to see all the information in one visualisation. It sounds like a small thing but it's really the whole point of the tool. The are issues about it in the QDirStat repo. The author has two objections: The first is that it would look ugly. That's pretty silly: obviously function is more important than looks when I'm tracking down disc space usage. Their other objection is that in Linux you have such a wide directory structure that all the labels would be uselessly crushed into tiny boxes anyway. That also doesn't make much sense to me; even if you have a lot of directories in your tour directory, usually there's only one or two containing the vast majority of disc usage (that's why the tool's useful on the first place!) so their labels will be clear, and if the others aren't then I don't care because I'm not interested in then in the first place. Perhaps the real problem is that QDirStat doesn't have the ability zoom in and out, and to increase and decrease the visibility depth, that SpaceSniffer does, which is also needed to make labels useful. Sorry, I didn't mean for that to turn into an essay!

dilap 8y ago

On the mac there is DaisyDisk

pault 8y ago

I've been using Disk Inventory X [0] for years. It's free and it works great! [0] http://www.derlien.com/ http://www.derlien.com/