v5.0.0 Disk City

[Prithvi-Web]

TreeMap 5.0.0

The first public release since 3.2.1. Everything below landed in the seven
months of work between them — the whole 4.x line was developed in the open
repository but never published, so this is the release where all of it
arrives at once.

If you are upgrading from 3.2.1, the short version: TreeMap now tells you
what is safe to delete rather than only what is big, it can account for
every gigabyte on the volume rather than only the ones it walked, and the
numbers it prints have been audited against the code that produces them.

Added

Deciding what to delete

• Reclaim Score. Every file and folder gets a score out of 100 for how
  safe and how worthwhile it is to remove, built from six signals: size
  against this scan's own spread, how long since it was last opened, whether
  a rule says it rebuilds itself, whether an identical copy is on this disk,
  whether it was downloaded, and whether a copy exists elsewhere.
• A badge beside each score opens a breakdown that says what every signal
  contributed and, in amber, what could not be measured. A signal TreeMap
  cannot read is named and left out — never counted as zero.
• A treemap colour mode and a sort that answer "what is safest to delete"
  instead of "what is biggest".
• The six weights are yours to change in Settings, with a reset. Setting one
  to zero removes that signal rather than scoring it worthless.
• A radar chart shows all six signals as one shape, so two files compare by
  silhouette. A signal that could not be measured keeps its spoke and the
  outline breaks around it.
• Last-opened dates, with the source that answered them named — and an
  honest "not available here" where the operating system does not record
  them, never a stand-in date.
• "Does a copy of this exist elsewhere?" — a recoverability verdict from
  Git, backups and cloud sync, with its reasons. It is never promoted to a
  definite yes by inference: a folder that is merely absent from a backup
  exclusion list is unknown, not backed up.

Searching

• A search grammar: size>100mb ext:mp4, -in:node_modules,
  modified>90d, used>1y, git:pushed, score>70.
• A live query box with autocomplete, and saved views you can pin as chips.
• Ask in plain words. The ✨ button turns "big videos I haven't opened in
  a year" into a real query, and always shows you the translation in an
  editable field before it runs. It works entirely offline, and words it
  ignored are listed rather than silently dropped.
• A saved view can become a Clean Up rule, and a Clean Up rule can become an
  Autopilot policy, pre-filled.

The cleanup cart

• An optional cleanup target in Settings ("free 50 GB") gives the cart a
  meter filling toward it. A meter and nothing else: no streaks, no badges,
  no confetti.
• Add to cart from every view that lists something reclaimable — Empty
  Folders, Clean Up rule matches, per-game shader caches, and "Stage N
  matches" from a treemap query.
• Preview after. The map re-lays itself with the staged items taken out,
  and the freed space stays on the map as a hatched block, so every rectangle
  still means the same number of bytes.
• Committing the cart runs through the Time Capsule as one undoable run — a
  dry run first, always, then one summary with a one-click undo that puts
  everything back at its original paths, even after the Trash has been
  emptied. Undo restores the original dates as well as the bytes.

New views

• Missing GB. One accounting statement for the volume, printed as a
  receipt that either adds up or names the gap. It shows what a files-only
  tool cannot: other volumes sharing the same storage pool (about 12 GB on a
  Mac), space held by programs still gripping a deleted file, and what the
  scan was refused. A line nobody can measure prints "unknown" with its
  reason — never 0.
• Disk City. The treemap's own tiling seen from a corner, encoding three
  things at once: footprint is bytes, height is staleness (or file count, or
  depth), colour is Reclaim score (or file kind, or age).
• Two more renderers on the same toolbar: circle packing and a Voronoi
  treemap, sharing the root, breadcrumbs, depth, colour mode and exports.
• A lasso (drag, or freehand with Alt) that stages what you draw around,
  with a live count inside the loop, and a magnifier (hold Z) that
  redraws the map at 4× so two-pixel tiles become readable names.
• History, holding Calendar (a year of writes, one cell per day —
  click or drag a range to filter the map), Journal (a plain-English
  record of significant changes, naming an app only when the path proves it
  and saying "an unidentified process" otherwise), and Compare with a
  photo-style split slider that wipes between two snapshots.
• Media libraries in the Libraries tab: Photos, Final Cut, iMovie,
  Lightroom and Capture One, split into originals / derivatives / database,
  with a cart button on derivatives only and the cost of regenerating each
  one stated.
• A duplicate compare viewer on every exact group and near-duplicate
  cluster — copies side by side with thumbnails, dimensions, the EXIF capture
  date or its honest absence, the differing blocks painted over
  near-duplicates, and the recommended keeper with the rule that picked it.
• A drive dock under the map listing attached external drives and their
  free space. Drag the cart onto one to offload. A drive whose statistics
  cannot be read is still listed, with the reason.

Playing back and exporting

• Transport controls on the time slider — play/pause, ½× to 4×, loop — that
  play a folder's history as a film.
• Export that history as an animated GIF (written by hand, no dependency,
  encoded off the main thread) or a WebM where the runtime can record a
  canvas. The menu says which you are getting.

Getting around

• A command palette on ⌘K covering every view, every action, your saved
  views, recent scan roots, eleven Settings sections, and "search files for…"
  for anything else.
• A guided first run that walks you through picking a folder, watching
  the scan land, reading the map, and up to three real quick wins from your
  own disk. Skippable at every step.
• Folder notes. Right-click any folder to pin words to it. A note pauses
  suggestions and automation for that whole subtree by default, and Autopilot
  reports the skip rather than quietly matching less.
• Human-scale sizes. Beside a large folder the tooltip can add "≈ 3,100
  photos or 42 videos like the ones here" — always averaged from that
  folder's own media, never from a made-up constant. A folder with nothing
  comparable says nothing.
• Budget gauges on the Dashboard: "at this pace, over in ~23 days (Sep
  22)", or the forecast's own refusal when the history is too short, too
  erratic or shrinking.

The desktop app

• TreeMap remembers its window — size, position, display, maximised and
  full-screen — and comes back where you left it.
• A real application menu: Settings ⌘, Scan Folder ⌘O, Rescan ⌘R, a Help
  menu, and an About panel with the version.
• Dock progress during a scan, and a bounce plus a notification when a long
  scan finishes while the window is not focused.
• Dropping several folders queues them instead of losing all but one.

For agents and scripts

• Two new MCP tools, reclaim_ranked and missing_gigabytes, bringing the
  total to ten.
• Eighteen new API routes, all described in the published OpenAPI document.

Changed

• The Games tab became Libraries and now holds media libraries
  alongside game libraries.
• Calendar, Journal and Compare became one History tab with an internal
  segment that remembers where you were. The sidebar went from seventeen tabs
  to fifteen.
• ⌘K now opens the command palette. / still summons global search.
• The Duplicates tab opens instantly. It used to freeze for about 400 ms
  on every visit; it is now about 15 ms.
• The cart list is paged at 200 with "N more staged, not listed here" and
  a Show all button. Every total still counts the whole cart.
• The app is faster to use. The sidebar, all thirteen sheets and the
  tooltip keep their frost but lose the displacement lens; the full-screen
  dim behind a dialog no longer blurs; the hover beam on cards is gone.
• Hovering the treemap repaints only the two tiles that changed, not the
  whole map.
• Near-duplicate clusters wrap instead of scrolling sideways, and their
  thumbnails are prepared when the hunt finishes — the first look at a
  cluster went from about 46 ms a picture to 5 ms.
• TreeMap no longer burns CPU when you are not using it. With the window
  closed it had been sitting at 20–60% eighteen minutes after a scan, because
  it was watching its own data folder and re-counting the whole index every
  400 ms.
• One dialect and one date format throughout.
• The welcome screen explains what a treemap is instead of comparing
  itself to another product.
• Every dialog takes, traps and returns focus, the page underneath is
  inert, and the thirteen segmented controls are real tab lists you can drive
  with arrow keys.
• The macOS first-launch instructions were rewritten (see Known limitations).

Fixed

• A folder macOS refused to open was reported as an empty folder.
  Scanning Desktop or Documents without Full Disk Access showed "Scanned 0
  files — 0 B", toasted "Scan complete", and the first-run card congratulated
  you on a clean folder. TreeMap now counts what it was refused, names those
  folders, and offers the Privacy settings button.
• Sparse files claimed space the disk does not hold. A virtual machine
  disk such as Docker.raw reserves its full size and fills only part of it —
  64 GB claimed, perhaps 12 GB on the disk — and TreeMap counted the claim,
  then blamed the difference on copy-on-write clones in the Missing GB
  receipt. There is a line for it now, and it is the difference both ways:
  small files hold slightly more than they claim, because a disk hands out
  room in fixed-size pieces.
• "Used" meant two different things. The Dashboard tile excluded the
  blocks the system reserves for itself while the Missing GB receipt did not,
  so on Linux the two disagreed by about 5% of the disk. Six places now read
  one published figure, and the receipt shows the reserve as its own band.
• Offload said "need 0.0 GB, only 0.0 GB free" about a 30 MB transfer.
• The Trends forecast line and the "disk full ~date" printed beside it were
  two different predictions. They are one claim now.
• Duplicates promised bytes that trashing would not free. On a Mac a
  Finder-duplicated file shares its storage, so removing the copy frees
  nothing. There is a line saying so, and after a duplicates trash TreeMap
  reports the measured change rather than the promise.
• Two hard-link counts wore near-identical labels — one counted extra
  names, the other counted files — so two screens disagreed. Relabelled, not
  recounted.
• The time scrubber jumped under your finger. Its label grew from 23 px
  to 174 px on the first pixel of a drag, shrinking the track by a quarter.
• Sizes never read "1024.0 KB" any more.
• A sparse file is no longer mistaken for an online-only cloud file — a
  virtual machine image or database file is not offered as safe to remove.
• A folder whose name ended in a slash or a space could not be opened
  through any part of the app, while the treemap drew it perfectly.
• Ordinary filenames broke the search box. Screenshot (1).png was read
  as a three-way query, and -hidden.txt highlighted every file except the
  one you typed.
• The Live toggle could read "Live" while nothing was being watched.
• Instant open showed the whole indexed folder's file counts against a
  subfolder's tree — a byte total describing one tree and an item count
  describing another.
• Empty Folders printed its 1,000-item cap as the real number, and ticked
  only what it had.
• A read that failed was being treated as a fact. A momentary error
  reading a file made the live index believe it had been deleted and shrink.
  The same shape was found and fixed in a dozen more places, including one
  that could have removed every protected copy the Time Capsule was holding.
• A check that could not run must not answer "nothing is open". The guard
  that looks for files in use returned a clean bill of health when it had not
  actually looked.
• Tidying up after an undo could undo the undo — a failed housekeeping
  step deleted the file that had just been restored.
• A cart with more than 500 items could not be committed at all.
• The circle-pack layout could block the app for a second, and the
  Voronoi layout for nearly three, on an awkward folder. Both are bounded
  now, refine across frames, and say what they could not draw.
• Drive Health named no drive on any machine, and the scan counters
  beside it were invented rather than fetched.
• A media library TreeMap could not read into was reported as "no media
  libraries" — on exactly the Mac the feature was built for.
• A confirmation opened from Settings painted behind Settings, and Escape
  closed the sheet underneath instead of the one on top.
• Dozens of smaller corrections to counts, captions and empty states, each
  one a number or a sentence that did not match what the code did.

Security

• Fleet pairing could be brute-forced. The six-digit code had no rate
  limit on the peer server; an audit made 33,966 guesses in three seconds. It
  is now five wrong guesses per machine and fifty in total, checked before
  the code is even looked up, and the offer withdraws itself and tells you
  which machine was trying.
• A blocked system folder was reachable by another spelling. On macOS
  /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/db — the local account database — was
  scannable while /private/var/db was blocked, because a firmlink is not a
  symlink and both halves of the guard compared text. The block list judges
  where a path really lives now.
• A folder symlink could walk the "inside the scanned folder" guard out to
  any file on the disk — for trash, open, terminal and preview alike. The
  gate judges location rather than spelling, while a symlink itself stays
  removable.
• The desktop app's local API was open to any program or web page on the
  machine that found the port. It starts with a per-launch token now, and
  the app's own window is handed a session of its own. A Host-header check
  and a Content-Security-Policy were added, and binding to anything other
  than the loopback address refuses to start without a token.
• A note that pauses automation now fails closed — a corrupt notes file
  pauses Autopilot with a message instead of silently switching every pause
  off.
• A query that does not parse, or that has no conditions, cannot be saved as
  an unattended policy, and a query policy never removes a folder.
• The cart button was removed from an application's own bundle and its user
  data, which had quietly widened "clear caches safely" into a one-click
  staging of the app itself.

Removed

• The optional Ollama local-model integration, end to end. The built-in
  phrase table is the whole plain-words feature, and a test proves that path
  contains no network code at all.
• The spinning border beam on card hover, the displacement lens on every
  glass surface, and the blur behind an open dialog — all removed for speed.

Also worth knowing

• Sizes are measured in 1024s and labelled KB/MB/GB, so they read about 7%
  smaller than the Finder, which counts in 1000s. Every number in TreeMap is
  measured the same way, so they always agree with each other.
• A fast rescan under-counts the "claimed against held" line. Folders that
  have not changed are read from the previous scan and not measured again, so
  that figure is a floor rather than a total. The receipt says so.

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📥 Installing

macOS — TreeMap-x.y.z-arm64.dmg · Apple Silicon only (M1/M2/M3/M4). Open the DMG, drag TreeMap into Applications.

⚠️ macOS will block the first launch — this is expected

You'll see “Apple could not verify ‘TreeMap.app’ is free of malware…”. Your download is
fine. macOS shows that for any app Apple hasn't notarized, and notarization needs a paid
$99/year Apple Developer membership this free project doesn't have.

Fastest fix — drag TreeMap to Applications, open Terminal, paste this, press Return:

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

No-Terminal fix — double-click TreeMap → Done → System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security
→ scroll to Security → Open Anyway → authenticate → double-click TreeMap → Open Anyway.
(That button expires after ~1 hour; if it's missing, double-click TreeMap again to bring it back.)

On macOS Sequoia (15) and Tahoe (26) the old right-click → Open trick no longer works —
Apple removed it. Use one of the two routes above.

Full walkthrough, including the "TreeMap is damaged" variant:
Installing on macOS

Windows — TreeMap-Setup-x.y.z.exe. Run it, click More info → Run anyway at the SmartScreen prompt.

Intel Mac / Linux — no desktop build; run web mode from source (3 commands).

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This discussion was created from the release v5.0.0 Disk City.