aToad #36: WinDirStat and Disk Usage Analyzer (dua)

Quickly visualize which folders are taking the most disk space. Again. Windows/Linux/Mac

So that’s a bit uncanny, considering that I posted a similar tool as #32 in that same series – although that was almost 3 years ago now, damn it’s been quiet here. But that previous other one seems to be abandoned (and also it’s Java).

WinDirStat is an open source tool, for Windows, in C++, with a nice GUI, to easily see which folders and files take the most space. I didn’t do a benchmark, but it feels a bit faster than JDiskReport and, like it, it can be used in portable mode. It has features I strongly missed in JDiskReport, notably the possibility to directly open the folders, as you browse, in the Windows Explorer.

Disk Usage Analyzer (dua) is an open source tool for Linux, Mac and Windows, in Rust, for people using the command line. I looked for it because I needed a CLI tool for a server. Depending on your distribution, you may be lucky enough to find it in your package manager (not sure if as dua or dua-cli), otherwise more options are described on the project page on crates.io or Github, such as MacPorts, Homebrew, Scoop, WinGet, whatever all these are, but my personal favorite is that their Github releases contain binaries that you can just use as is. Not sure if this is portable or if it will write settings somewhere, but also not sure if there are any settings to write, so my guess is portable.
I used it by running it repeatedly for different base paths and with this little help page, but you can also run it in interactive mode, using dua i or dua interactive.

Last but not least, if you’re a die-hard fan of using only the package manager, maybe then ncdu will suit you better. I only briefly tried it (and got annoyed by its interactive-only mode), but from the look of it I believe it’s fairly similar to dua in interactive mode.