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Show HN: Leaves – A text-UI disk usage treemap visualizer

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Why This Matters

Leaves introduces a text-based disk usage visualization tool that enables users to analyze storage hierarchies directly in terminal environments. Its lightweight, remote-compatible design makes it especially useful for managing disk space on servers or systems without graphical interfaces, offering a practical alternative to traditional GUI-based analyzers. This development enhances accessibility and efficiency for developers and system administrators working in command-line environments.

Key Takeaways

Leaves

A text-mode disk usage visualization utility

Description

Leaves is a disk usage analyzer inspired by WinDirStat and QDirStat.

It shows files and directories in a hierarchy of nested rectangles. The area of a rectangle is proportional to its size. A 200 MB file will have twice the size as a sibling with 100 MB. The parent directory will have about 3 times the area of the smaller file.

However, due to the limited resolution of working at a character level, this is a fairly coarse approximation compared to a graphical tool. On the other hand, this will work over remote shell connections when graphical desktop environments are not available or impractical.

Getting Started

You can download a pre-built binary for a select number of platforms from the releases page. If one is not available for your system, follow this section to build from source.

Dependencies

A Rust toolchain is required to build this project.

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