Space

A disk-space cleanup tool. Point it at a directory and it surfaces what is old, bulky, or redundant, so you can clear it out with confidence.

This is not a general-purpose file manager. Nautilus and its peers already do that job well. Space is optimized for one question: what should I delete to free up disk?

Features so far

• Recursive directory sizes. A parallel jwalk walker fills a shared cache in the background. The UI stays responsive during the cold pass.
• Four views of the same data.
  • List with sortable columns (name, modified, size) and stable fallback for unknown sizes.
  • Grid of tile icons that reflows to window width.
  • Hierarchical icicle columns view: each column is one directory depth, with cells sized proportionally to byte totals. Click a folder to zoom in, click the root block to zoom out.
  • Squarified treemap of the current directory's direct children, sized proportionally to on-disk bytes. Double-click a tile to drill down; the breadcrumb and up button zoom back out.
• Selection + standard actions. Click / ctrl-click / shift-click, context menu (cut, copy, paste, copy path, rename, move to trash, delete permanently), keyboard shortcuts.
• Free-space readout in the status bar. Tracks the device that hosts the current path, live as you navigate.
• Persisted preferences. View mode, sort, hidden-file toggle, window size, last location.
• Localization. German and English ship; strings live in gettext .po catalogs and get bundled into the binary at build time via Slint's translation support.

What it is not (yet)

See TODO.md for the roadmap. Short version: age/last-used column, filter bar, aggregate summary header, duplicate detection, cleanup presets in the sidebar, per-MIME async icons, thumbnails, batch operations with undo, watcher-based auto-refresh.

Tech stack

• Rust 2024 edition
• Slint for the UI, targeting 1.16
• jwalk + rayon for parallel directory walking
• trash for move-to-trash
• xdg-mime and freedesktop-icons for MIME resolution (kept minimal for speed; richer icons are on the roadmap)

Slint's built-in translation system handles i18n via gettext .po files compiled into the binary by build.rs.

Installing

Space is published on crates.io as spacefinder (the name space was already taken). It currently targets Linux only.

cargo install spacefinder

That installs a spacefinder binary. Prebuilt Linux bundles (AppImage and .deb) are attached to each GitHub release.

Building

cargo build --release

Debug builds also work for iteration. First build fetches and compiles deps, so it takes a few minutes. Rebuilds are fast thanks to Slint's incremental code generation and (optionally) sccache.

Optional: set up sccache as RUSTC_WRAPPER in ~/.cargo/config.toml for faster rebuilds across checkouts.

Running

spacefinder [PATH]

With no argument the app restores the last-opened directory (or falls back to $HOME on first run). Pass PATH to open a specific directory, --help for the full CLI, or --version.

Preferences are stored at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/spacefinder/config.json (typically ~/.config/spacefinder/config.json).

Switch views via the four toggle buttons in the header (list, grid, columns, treemap). Right-click for the context menu. F2 renames, Delete moves to trash, F5 refreshes. Ctrl+L focuses the path bar.

Status

Prototype, Linux only for now. Usable for browsing and basic cleanup, but the scope of the project is larger than what ships today. Bug reports and suggestions welcome via the issue tracker.

License

GPL-3.0-only. See individual source files for header comments.