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QDirStat Development History

This is more verbose than a traditional change log, thus the unusual name of this file.

See the README.md file for the latest news:

https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/README.md

QDirStat History

  • 2024-01-14 New stable release: 1.9

    Summary:

    • Greatly improved the visual appearance of the treemap thanks to @Lithopsian

    • Dominant (very large) items are now highlighted in bold font in the tree view

    • New "Find" function in the scanned directory tree

    • Added support for bookmarks

    • New documentation to explain the treemap

    • Some small improvements

    • Bug fixes

    See also the release announcement.

  • 2024-01-13

  • 2024-01-12

    • Clarified "File Type Statistics" that don't seem to add up and changed the code to make more obvious what's going on there (GitHub issue #241).

  • 2024-01-06

    • Now following a symlink target passed as a command line argument GitHub issue #240.

      This is is useful both when starting QDirStat from the command line and when starting it from a file manager (right-click -> "Start with QDirStat" on an item that turns out to be a symlink).

  • 2024-01-05

    • The release is getting nearer.

    • Re-worked the context menus again.

      Now disabled actions are no longer added which shortens them considerably: Some actions work only for directories, some others only for files. Since context menus are contextual, as the name implies, they should generally not contain every possible action, and no disabled actions (usability guidelines differ in this aspect).

      Some context menu entries were only there to make certain actions discoverable; like the "File Size / Type / Age Statistics". It might not be so obvious to users that any of those can also be started for just a subtree of the current directory tree, limiting those views to only that subtree.

      Those menu entries are now in a "View in" submenu, so they are still there, but they no longer take so much screen space in the context menu.

    • Lots of small improvements in many places like some more icons where they made sense; and many more.

  • 2024-01-01

    • Cleaned up the context menus in the tree view and in the treemap view:

      • Removed some less commonly used options like "Copy to clipboard" (also available from the main menu and via the Ctrl+C keyboard shortcut)

      • Moved very common actions ("Move to Trash" and the other cleanups) to the top

        It turned out this was a bad idea: The first action is easily executed accidentially, especially on a laptop with a touchpad. It happened to me, but I was aware what happened and how to undo it. Now non-destrucive actions like "move up" and "move to top" are back on the top of the context menu.

      • Moved other actions to the bottom. Many of those are only in the context menu to raise awareness that they even exist, like starting other views from a subdirectory (file size, file type, file age statistics) or the treemap zoom actions (typically used via mouse wheel if there is one).

  • 2023-12-30

    • Added bookmarks, very much like in an Internet browser.

      There is now a star icon to the left of the current path to show you if it's a bookmark / favorite, and you can click on it (or use Ctrl+D like in all major browsers) to bookmark or un-bookmark it.

      The "Go" menu now has a "To Bookmarks" submenu where the bookmarks appear. Selecting one of them will go to that location in the tree. Bookmarks that are not in the current tree are disabled, but still there.

      As with the "Cleanups" menu, you can "tear off" the bookmarks menu and leave it open at a convenient place on your screen for instant access.

      The bookmarks are stored in a simple text file at ~/.config/QDirStat/bookmarks.txt so you can easily edit, add or delete them in bulk.

      A use case are all those Internet browser cache directories somewhere deep below ~/.cache and ~/.config that keep filling up with Gigabytes of stuff, and that are never emptied even when you tell your browser to clear browsing data.

      Use the new "Find" function to search for "cache" and "thumbnails" directories and bookmark them so you can easily revisit them: Tear off both the "Bookmarks" and the "Cleanups" menu, move them to the side and go through the bookmarks one by one and decide for which ones you want to use the "Clear Directory Contents" cleanup action. Cleaning up browser cruft becomes very easy.

      ...and yes, they dump tons of cruft not only into the ~/.cache directory which has the express purpose of just that, they also do it in ~/.config which is intended for configuration data, not for random junk that can be easily restored. Chrome / Chromium, Firefox, Opera, even Thunderbird - they all do it.

      When you've cleaned up often enough like that to get a feeling where it's worthwhile, you can even use the bookmarks file as a starting point for a simple script to automate the task.

    • A new stable release QDirStat V1.9 is getting nearer. It still needs some more testing with all the changes recently.

  • 2023-12-29

    • Much improved initial selection: After reading a directory tree from disk, sometimes nothing was selected, so the details panel on the right remained empty. A click on the toplevel item would resolve this, but it should really be automatic. Now it does.

    • Much improved selection after a destructive cleanup and refreshing that part of the directory tree: If you deleted a file ("move to trash" etc.), that directory was read again from disk. But since the previously selected item was now gone, that couldn't be selected anymore, and you were thrown out of context. Now the parent directory is selected and its branch opened again so you have a much better idea where you are, and you see the summary of that directory in the details panel.

  • 2023-12-25

    • @Lithopsian contributed some very visible improvements to the treemap. See GitHub issue #236 for details and lots of screenshots.

    • The "Find Files" dialog now has a separate checkbox for symlinks.

    • A new release is upcoming in the near future. It will be QDirStat 1.9.

  • 2023-11-08

    • It's SUSE Hack Week again where my employer SUSE sponsors a whole week of innovative hacking for the whole company: Everybody can work on a favorite project. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, my favorite project during that time has almost always been QDirStat since I started it back in 2015.

      Changes this time:

      • A "find files" function in the in-memory tree. You can search for files or directories or both with various options.

        More screenshots at GitHub issue #222.

        The search results are presented in the same window that you might know from the "Discover" actions (largest files, oldest files, broken symlinks etc.). That means that you can move this results window out of the way and select each of the results to see it in the main window with all details.

        Some time ago, that window also got support for cleanup options, so you can use them there directly from the context menu or with keyboard shortcuts.

        Searching in the in-memory directory tree is lightning fast, and it's flexible with all the search modes:

        • Contains
        • Starts with
        • Ends with
        • Wildcard
        • Regexp

        With just a tiny bit of customizing, that makes for a very flexible media browser: I configured 'VLC' as one of the cleanup actions, and now I can search through my video or music collection easily to find media files where I only know a fraction of the title and start playing it right away, directly from within QDirStat. Or open a file manager there. Or a shell window. Or whatever else might come to mind.

        This opens a lot of new possibilities. Use your imagination!

        This is all still a bit rough around the edges, but it's already quite workable.

  • 2023-02-01

    • New feature: Showing dominant items in the directory tree in bold font. This may not sound spectacular, but it is immensely helpful to spot disproportinally large directories or files. If you don't like it, you can turn it off, of course.

      Screenshots and more details at GitHub issue #210.

    • Bug fix: Now correctly showing the target of symlinks in the packages view.

  • 2023-01-30

    • Fixed sorting when directories have the same total allocated size, but a different byte size.

  • 2022-06-30 New stable release: 1.8.1

    Summary:

    • New treemap interaction: Middle click in the treemap now highlights the parent directories of the clicked item, and everything outside that branch is dimmed.

    • Some small improvements

    • Bug fixes

    Details:

    • A middle click now outlines an item's parent, grandparent etc. directories in the treemap.

      Middle-click it again or click outside the highlighted area to remove the highlight.

      You can use the middle click pretty much like a left click, including Shift- and Ctrl-click to extend the selection.

      See GitHub issue #181 for a screenshot and more details.

    • No longer drawing additional lines in the treemap by default if there is low contrast between individual treemap tiles; that only makes the treemap display uglier for little benefit.

      You can still switch it on with the EnforceContrast setting in the config file (~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf).

    • Don't show inactive (unmounted) mounts managed by the automounter anymore in the "Places and Mounted Filesystems" bar of the "Open Directory" dialog.

      Notice that those directories are still accessible from the tree at the right side, but they no longer take a prominent place in the left bar.

    • Prevent a hanging Samba (CIFS) or NFS mount from blocking the program, even when no information from that mount is needed at all:

      If you started QDirStat with a path on the command line, it collected the information about used / free / reserved disk space for all mounted filesystems already. If you had a network mount that didn't respond, you still had to wait for a timeout before the program could continue.

      Now it collects that information only when it's really needed:

      • In the "Open Directory" dialog where it displays those sizes in the "Places and Mounted Filesystems" bar on the left

      • In the "Mounted Filesystems" (du-like) window (Menu "View" -> "Show Mounted Filesystems").

    • Now cutting off insanely long generated device names of LUKS devices in the "Mounted Filesystems" window: E.g. /dev/mapper/luks-3fae43... instead of /dev/mapper/luks-3fae4328-4294-4c77-8f98-d437c41da26c. The long name is displayed in a tooltip.

    • Added packed Git archives ("pack-*.pack") to the "Compressed Archives" MIME category, i.e., they appear now in green in the treemap, no longer in the "I don't know what that thing is" grey.

      If you never changed your MIME type configuration, simply delete ~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat-mime.conf (while QDirStat is not running!) to get this change; it will be regenerated with the new defaults upon the next program start.

    Bug fixes:

    • Fixed GitHub issue #184: When reading a cache file, sparse files were displayed as "allocated: 0 Bytes".

    • Fixed GitHub issue #190: MIME categories for overlapping suffixes

      Files with multiple suffixes like .tar.gz were wrongly sorted into the same MIME category as .gz. It did find the category for the longer one (.tar.gz), but then it continued looking, resulting in the shortest matching one (.gz). Now stopping at the longest hit.

    • Now using xdg-open %d in KDE Plasma for the "Open File Manager Here" standard cleanup action. This may help for GitHub issue #192, yet still maintain the ability to use a powerful file manager like Konqueror (if that is configured), falling back to the standard Dolphin.

    • Improved BSD support (GitHub issue #195): If neither /proc/mounts nor /etc/mtab is available, fall back to using QStorageInfo (if available; Qt 5.4 or later).

      This returns a little less complete information; for example, only rudimentary mount options which are used for some special cases.

    • Bug fix for the "Packages" view for .deb / APT based systems: Now also list packages that are on hold. They were previously missing.

  • 2022-06-28

    • A middle click in the treemap now toggles the highlight of that tile's parent and ancestors on or off. Previously, it always kept the highlight, and you had to click outside the highlighted area to get rid of the highlight again.

    • Added packed Git archives ("pack-*.pack") to the "Compressed Archives" MIME category, i.e., they appear now in green in the treemap, no longer in the "I don't know what that thing is" grey.

    • No longer drawing additional lines in the treemap by default if there is low contrast between individual treemap tiles; that only makes the treemap display uglier for little benefit. You can still switch it on with the EnforceContrast setting in the config file (~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf).

  • 2022-05-31

    • Bug fix for the "Packages" view for .deb / APT based systems: Now also list packages that are on hold. They were previously missing.

  • 2022-05-30

    • Improved BSD support (GitHub issue #195): If neither /proc/mounts nor /etc/mtab is available, fall back to using QStorageInfo (if available; Qt 5.4 or later).

      This returns a little less complete information; for example, only rudimentary mount options which are used for some special cases.

  • 2022-05-19

    • Now using xdg-open %d in KDE Plasma for the "Open File Manager Here" standard cleanup action. This may help for GitHub issue #192, yet still maintain the ability to use a powerful file manager like Konqueror (if that is configured), falling back to the standard Dolphin.

  • 2022-03-08

    • Fixed GitHub issue #190: MIME categories for overlapping suffixes

      Files with multiple suffixes like .tar.gz were wrongly sorted into the same MIME category as .gz. It did find the category for the longer one (.tar.gz), but then it continued looking, resulting in the shortest matching one (.gz). Now stopping at the longest hit.

  • 2022-02-25

    • Prevent a hanging Samba (CIFS) or NFS mount from blocking the program, even when no information from that mount is needed at all:

      If you started QDirStat with a path on the command line, it collected the information about used / free / reserved disk space for all mounted filesystems already. If you had a network mount that didn't respond, you still had to wait for a timeout before the program could continue.

      Now it collects that information only when it's really needed:

      • In the "Open Directory" dialog where it displays those sizes in the "Places and Mounted Filesystems" bar on the left

      • In the "Mounted Filesystems" (du-like) window (Menu "View" -> "Show Mounted Filesystems").

  • 2022-01-04

    • Now cutting off insanely long generated device names of LUKS devices in the "Mounted Filesystems" window: E.g. /dev/mapper/luks-3fae43... instead of /dev/mapper/luks-3fae4328-4294-4c77-8f98-d437c41da26c. The long name is displayed in a tooltip.

  • 2021-12-30

    • Don't show inactive (unmounted) mounts managed by the automounter anymore in the "Places and Mounted Filesystems" bar of the "Open Directory" dialog.

      Notice that those directories are still accessible from the tree at the right side, but they no longer take a prominent place in the left bar.

  • 2021-12-12

  • 2021-09-28

    • Merged the changes for GitHub issue #176 to master:

      In the treemap, a middle click now also behaves like a left click (including Ctrl+click); but it also displays white frames indicating the parent directories of that item, and everything that does not belong to that directory branch is covered by a transparent overlay.

      See GitHub issue #181 for a screenshot and more details.

  • 2021-08-28 New stable release: 1.8

    Summary:

    • New view: File Age Statistics

    • Navigation history like in a web browser (Back, Forward)

    • Bug fixes

    • Some small improvements

    Details:

    • New view: File Age Statistics

      This shows the number of files per year and/or per month that were last modified in that year or month, together with the total size of those files and a percent bar for both (number and total size).

    • New documentation for that view: File Age Statistics

    • Navigation history for directories like in a web browser:

      • New buttons Back / Forward in the tool bar

      • Standard keyboard shortcuts [Alt] [Cursor Left] / [Alt] [Cursor Right] like in all common web browsers

      • Support for Back / Forward mouse buttons if the mouse has them

      • History menu on those buttons (long press on the buttons) for the last 16 directories

    • Internal restructuring and refactoring to keep the code maintainable

    • Bug fixes:

      • Fixed GitHub issue #169: Shorten path components in the breadcrumb widget for insanely long paths.

      • Now closing a left-over Permissions error panel when refreshing from disk. After the re-read, the permissions error may no longer be there.

    • Small improvements:

      • In the Mounted Filesystems window, don't show inactive mounts managed by the automounter anymore.

      • In the Open Directory window, automatically open the first directory level if a path was clicked in the Places list on the left, and scroll the tree on the right so that path is at the top.

      • Added a little margin to the left in the main window's tree view for the Size column so it looks now less cramped.

  • 2021-08-06

    • Lots of internal restructuring and refactoring to keep the code maintainable: In particular, the MainWindow code was getting out of hand with more and more features and menu actions being added all the time, so some of that was moved out to separate classes.

      That involved quite some testing and rethinking how certain parts are working, which in turn involved some head-scratching, rearranging code had the byproduct of more internal documentation and also some small bug fixes.

    • The "Permissions error" panel message didn't always go away when the user had simply left it open and just opened a new directory; and probably also in some other situations. Now it's always cleanly removed whenever a new directory tree is read or when it's re-read ("Refresh all" or "Refresh Selected"). That was one of those small bug fixes.

  • 2021-07-31

    • Now the "File Age Statistics" window also shows statistics for the months of this and the last year as collapsible (and by default collapsed) items in the same list, so you can break down the age of files further for the last 13-24 months. If a month entry is selected in that list, locating the files of course only locates the files that were last modified within that month.

      More details and more screenshots at GitHub issue #172.

  • 2021-07-29

    • Added a "Back" and a "Forward" button to move back and forth in the history of visited directories; i.e. QDirStat behaves now very much like a web browser when navigating the filesystem.

      It also has a history menu when you long-press the "Back" or "Forward" buttons, and of course it uses the same keyboard shortcuts [Alt] [Cursor Left] and [Alt] [Cursor Right] that all common web browsers use.

  • 2021-07-28

    • Added a "Locate" button to the new File Age Statistics view, using the same window as the actions from the "Discover" menu.

      This is enabled if there are no more than 1000 files in the currently selected year to avoid the results list to become too long and too unwieldy. If there are more than 1000 files in the currently selected year, break it down to another subdirectory first; otherwise you'd be ending up with the better part of the whole filesystem in the results list in the extreme case.

  • 2021-07-27

    • Added a whole new type of view: File Age Statistics, displaying file modification times by years, so you can see during what time frame there was any activity in a directory tree:

      More details and a lot more screenshots at GitHub issue #172.

  • 2021-07-02

    • Don't show inactive (unmounted) mounts managed by the automounter anymore in the "Mounted Filesystems" window. They were listed there as filesystem type "autofs" and 0 bytes total size which was not very useful.

      Once they become auto-mounted by a user accessing them in the filesystem, they are shown there normally, of course.

  • 2021-06-26

    • Improved the fix for GitHub issue #169: Breadcrumbs navigator becomes too wide for very long paths.

      Now no longer aggressively shortening all path components in the breadcrumbs navigator when the complete path becomes even just a little bit too long, but concentrating on the longest parts and shortening them one by one until the complete path is not too long anymore.

  • 2021-06-24

    • First (crude) fix for GitHub issue #169: Breadcrumbs navigator becomes too wide for very long paths. Now shortening path components if the overall path would become too wide. Right now it shortens them a bit too aggressively.

  • 2021-06-21 QDirStat AppImage and why I don't like it

    TL;DR:

    • It's big and fat (113 MB)
    • It's an outdated version (QDirStat 1.6.1 from 16 months ago)
    • It doesn't even tell you what version it contains
    • It still needs a fairly recent version of GLibc, so you can't run it on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
    • It's unclear if at least the libraries inside (e.g. the Qt libs) are up to date

  • 2021-04-05 New stable release: 1.7.1

    Summary:

    • Added a "Discover" toplevel menu with actions to easily find

      • the largest files
      • the newest files
      • the oldest files
      • files with multiple hard links
      • broken symbolic links
      • sparse files

    • Now showing the target of symbolic links in the details panel. If the target does not exist, a Broken Link warning is also shown.

    • Menu reorganization. The new toplevel menus are now:

      File, Edit, View, Go To, Discover, Clean up, Help

    • Enabled Refresh Selected now for files as well. In that case, the parent directory is refreshed.

    • Added hotkey [F6] for Refresh Selected.

    • Now ignoring the loopback mounts of installed snap packages in the "Open Directory" dialog and in the "Mounted Filesystems" window.

    • Added links to external documents to a new "Problems and Solutions" submenu of the "Help" menu so they are more easily discoverable.

    • Added a document about finding files that are shadowed by a mount and a script for the most common case.

    • Bug fix: Fixed GitHub Issue #149:

      Segfault when using a cleanup action with refresh policy AssumeDeleted after a cleanup action with RefreshParent in the same directory.

    Details:

    • Added a "Discover" toplevel menu with actions to easily find

      • the largest files
      • the newest files
      • the oldest files
      • files with multiple hard links
      • broken symbolic links
      • sparse files

      in the whole displayed directory tree or, if a directory is selected, in that subtree.

      In each case, a non-modal dialog is opened with a list of the results. Clicking on one of them selects it in the main window where you can see more details and use cleanup actions.

      Most of that was already there in some way or the other, but now it's easier to discover (pun intended) and to use.

      Finding large files is of course what the treemap is primarily for; just spot large blobs and click on them to find out what they are and where they are hiding.

      Finding the newest files can also be done by sorting the tree by the "last modified" column and then opening the topmost branches. This is often useful to find out where some browser dumped that last download.

      Similarly, to find the oldest files, enable the "oldest files" tree column, sort by that and open branches until you can see a file.

      Files with multiple hard links or sparse files were mentioned in the log; otherwise they were not so easy to find (short of using the command line, of course).

    • Now showing the target of symbolic links in the details panel.

      If it's a short path, the whole path is shown; otherwise without the path (".../somewhere"), and the full path is shown as a pop-up upon mouse click.

      If the target does not exist, a Broken Link warning is also shown.

    • Menu reorganization: They had become a little too crowded, especially on the top level.

      • The new toplevel menus are now:

        File, Edit, View, Go To, Discover, Clean up, Help

        I.e. it's down to 7 items which is generally regarded as the gold standard by usability experts.

      • The former "Settings" menu is gone; "Configure QDirStat" is now in the "Edit" menu. There was only that one action in the "Settings" menu, and that is quite wasteful in terms of screen space and toplevel menu complexity.

      • Moved out some options entirely from the menus; they are still available when editing the config file manually:

        • "Show current path"
        • "Treemap as side panel"

      • "Expand tree level" is now limited to level 5 (formerly 9). Opening that many tree branches means a huge performance drop anyway.

      • The former "Treemap" menu is now a submenu of "View". Most of those actions are available as tool bar buttons and mouse wheel operations anyway.

    • Enabled Refresh Selected now for files as well. In that case, the parent directory is refreshed.

    • Added hotkey [F6] for Refresh Selected.

      [F5] is still Refresh All like in all web browsers. Since window managers / desktop environments tend to consume [F5] with modifier keys ([Shift] [F5], [Alt] [F5], [Ctrl] [F5]), this is the closest we can get, and it's more consistent than using something like [Ctrl] [R].

      This was inspired by the discussion in PR#145.

    • Now ignoring the loopback mounts of installed snap packages in the "Open Directory" dialog and in the "Mounted Filesystems" window.

      Yes, each of them has a separate loop mount, even if it's only installed, not in active use. Those mounts clutter the output of commands like df or mount with nonsensical cruft:

      df -hT | grep snap

/dev/loop0  squashfs  159M  159M  0 100% /snap/chromium/1244
/dev/loop1  squashfs   55M   55M  0 100% /snap/core18/1880
/dev/loop2  squashfs   63M   63M  0 100% /snap/gtk-common-themes/1506
/dev/loop3  squashfs   30M   30M  0 100% /snap/snapd/8542

      (From a freshly installed Xubuntu 20.04 LTS)

    • Added links to external documents to a new "Problems and Solutions" submenu of the "Help" menu so they are more easily discoverable.

    • Added a document about finding files that are shadowed by a mount and a script for the most common case.

    • Bug fix: Fixed GitHub Issue #149:

      Segfault when using a cleanup action with refresh policy AssumeDeleted after a cleanup action with RefreshParent in the same directory.

  • 2021-03-24

  • 2021-03-19

    • Added a context menu to the "Locate Files" window (the "Discover" results) with the cleanup actions that are applicable to files.

    • Keyboard shortcuts for cleanups now also work in the "Locate Files" window.

  • 2020-12-21

    • Fixed GitHub Issue #149: Segfault when using a cleanup action with refresh policy AssumeDeleted after a cleanup action with RefreshParent in the same directory.

  • 2020-11-23

    • Menu reorganization: They had become a little too crowded, especially on the top level.

      • Moved out some options from the menus; they are still available when editing the config file manually:

        • "Show current path"
        • "Treemap as side panel"

      • "Expand tree level" is now limited to level 5 (formerly 9). Opening that many tree branches means a huge performance drop anyway.

      • The former "Treemap" menu is now a submenu of "View". Most of those actions are available as tool bar buttons and mouse wheel operations anyway.

      • The former "Settings" menu is gone; "Configure QDirStat" is now in the "Edit" menu. There was only that one action in the "Settings" menu, and that is quite wasteful in terms of screen space and toplevel menu complexity.

        I experimented shortly with moving some more settings there, e.g. "Show details panel" and "Show tremap", but I reverted that: The details panel is different for each layout (L1, L2, L3), and the layout switching actions are in the "View" menu where they belong; so "Show details panel" should really remain near them. And not having "Show treemap" in the "Treemap" submenu would be very confusing.

      The new toplevel menus are now:

      • File
      • Edit
      • View
      • Go To
      • Discover
      • Clean up
      • Help

      I.e. it's down to 7 items which is generally regarded as the gold standard by usability experts.

      I am not completely happy yet with how additional views are scattered among several menus:

      • "File" -> "Show installed packages"
      • "File" -> "Show unpackaged files"
      • "View" -> "File size statistics"
      • "View" -> "File type statistics"
      • "View" -> "Show mounted filesystems"

      The rationale is that those views in the "File" menu load completely new content, replacing the scanned directory in both the tree view and the treemap; thus they are on a similar level as "Open directory", so they are right next to that action.

      The other views open in separate windows, so they are add-on views to the currently loaded directory tree.

  • 2020-11-22

    • Added a "Discover" toplevel menu to easily find

      • the largest files
      • the newest files
      • the oldest files
      • files with multiple hard links
      • broken symbolic links
      • sparse files

      in the whole displayed directory tree or, if a directory is selected, in that subtree.

      In each case, a non-modal dialog is opened with a list of the results. Clicking on one of them selects it in the main window where you can see more details and use cleanup actions.

      Most of that was already there in some way or the other, but now it's easier to discover (pun intended) and to use.

      Finding large files is of course what the treemap is primarily for; just spot large blobs and click on them to find out what they are and where they are hiding.

      Finding the newest files can also be done by sorting the tree by the "last modified" column and then opening the topmost branches. This is often useful to find out where some browser dumped that last download.

      Similarly, to find the oldest files, enable the "oldest files" tree column, sort by that and open branches until you can see a file.

      Files with multiple hard links or sparse files were mentioned in the log; otherwise they were not so easy to find (short of using the command line, of course).

  • 2020-10-23

    • Now showing the target of symbolic links in the details panel.

      If it's a short path, the whole path is shown; otherwise without the path (".../somewhere"), and the full path is shown as a pop-up upon mouse click.

      If the target does not exist, a Broken Link warning is also shown.

  • 2020-10-15

    • Enabled Refresh Selected now for files as well. In that case, the parent directory is refreshed.

    • Added hotkey [F6] for Refresh Selected.

      [F5] is still Refresh All like in all web browsers. Since window managers / desktop environments tend to consume [F5] with modifier keys ([Shift] [F5], [Alt] [F5], [Ctrl] [F5]), this is the closest we can get, and it's more consistent than using something like [Ctrl] [R].

      This was inspired by the discussion in PR#145.

  • 2020-08-03

    • Now ignoring the loopback mounts of installed snap packages in the "Open Directory" dialog and in the "Mounted Filesystems" window.

      Yes, each of them has a separate loop mount, even if it's only installed, not in active use. Those mounts clutter the output of commands like df or mount with nonsensical cruft:

      df -hT | grep snap

/dev/loop0  squashfs  159M  159M  0 100% /snap/chromium/1244
/dev/loop1  squashfs   55M   55M  0 100% /snap/core18/1880
/dev/loop2  squashfs   63M   63M  0 100% /snap/gtk-common-themes/1506
/dev/loop3  squashfs   30M   30M  0 100% /snap/snapd/8542

      (From a freshly installed Xubuntu 20.04 LTS)

      Thanks a lot. Time to extend my df shell alias to exclude filesystem type "squashfs", too:

      alias df='/bin/df -x tmpfs -x devtmpfs -x squashfs -h $*'

  • 2020-07-26 New stable release: 1.7

    Summary:

    • Closing the gap between sizes reported by QDirstat and sizes reported by the du command: Now also taking the allocated size into account.

    • Now also displaying the allocated size where it makes sense.

    • New "Mounted Filesystems" window showing output similar to the df command (but without the cruft).

    • New directory selection dialog showing all (real) filesystems.

    • New checkbox to cross filesystems (temporarily) in the directory selection dialog.

    • Workaround for NTFS oddities: Ignoring hard links on NTFS.

    • Added config option to ignore hard links in general.

    • Added a document about Btrfs free size and how different tools tend to show different values: Btrfs-Free-Size.md

    • Bug fixes

    Details:

    • Closing the gap between sizes reported by QDirstat and sizes reported by the du command: Now also taking the allocated size into account.

      There were repeated threads on various social media where users wondered why QDirStat displayed different sizes than the du or the df commands, sometimes slightly different, sometimes off by quite a lot.

      In short, this is mostly due to the difference between a file's byte size and its allocated blocks: On most filesystem types, a file of 49 bytes still consumes a minimum of 4 KB (4096 bytes); disk space is allocated in clusters (typically 4 KB), not byte by byte. On a typical Linux root filesystem with many thousands of tiny files, this difference can add up to a lot.

      Formerly, QDirStat only added up the byte sizes, disregarding the allocated, but really unused part at the end of tiny files. The rationale was that some filesystem types handle that in more intelligent ways, yet there is no documented way to get information from a filesystem if it actually does that. It turned out that in reality, most of them don't bother; they simply let most of that last cluster go to waste.

      Now QDirStat displays both sizes where useful:

      • For tiny files, the tree view now shows both sizes: "49 B (4k)"

      • For directories, the tree view now shows the total of the allocated sizes. This may sound a bit inconsistent, but it feels very natural and intuitive: You are typically interested in how much disk space the subtree consumes, no matter if some part of that is really wasted.

      • The details view shows both sizes when there is a difference (in the displayed numeric precision): "Size: 42.1 MB" vs. "Allocated: 42.2 MB", but not "Size: 42.0 MB" vs. "Allocated: 42.0 MB".

      • Treemap tiles now correspond to a file's allocated size. This makes a real difference for tiny files.

      More details at GitHub Issue #134: Size Difference between QDirStat Reports and the "du" and "df" Commands.

    • New "Mounted Filesystems" window ("View" -> "Show Mounted Filesystems" or Ctrl-M):

      This shows information about "normal" mounted filesystems (excluding system mounts like /dev, /proc, /sys, bind mounts, Btrfs subvolumes) with usage data as reported by the filesystem itself. The "Reserved" column shows the disk space reserved for the root user on that filesystem, "Free" is the available space for non-privileged users.

      Sometimes the "Used" size reported here may be different from what QDirStat reports after reading that complete filesystem; this can be due to metadata, journals or snapshots. Notice that in those cases, the du command will also display a different value than the df command.

    • QDirStat now has its own custom directory selection dialog; it no longer uses one of the simplistic Qt standard file dialogs:

      The "Places" bar on the left shows your home directory and all "real" filesystems (the same as in the new "Mounted Filesystems" window). For each filesystem, it shows

      • The mount point
      • The total size of the filesystem
      • The filesystem type ("ext4", "btrfs", "ntfs", ...)
      • The device name ("/dev/sda2") (in a tooltip)

      In the "Path" combo box you can simply edit the path or copy and paste it from another window. Use the "Up" button to move one directory level up.

    • The "Cross Filesystems" checkbox lets you temporarily override the global configuration option of the same name: QDirStat will then no longer stop when a mount point is found during reading a subtree, it will descend into that mounted filesystem and read it, too; but again, only for "real" filesystems, not for system mounts such as /dev, /sys, /proc, not for bind mounts, not for filesystems mounted multiple times, and not for network mounts (NFS, Samba / CIFS).

      More details at GitHub Issue #129.

    • Added a workaround for wrong size sums on NTFS: Now disregarding hard links on NTFS.

      The (current?) ntfs-3g implementation using fuseblk seems to disagree with Windows tools which files really have hard links.

      It appears that ntfs-3g regards even the MS-DOS compatible short filename (PROGRA~2 vs. Program Files) as a hard link which is of course utter nonsense; that means that almost all files on an NTFS partition are reported as having multiple hard links, so QDirStat displayed them as having only half their real size.

      Notice that this is a bug in ntfs-3g, not in QDirStat.

      See also GitHub Issue #88.

    • Added a config option to ignore hard links.

      This is useful for a very small number of use cases. Hard links are not very common anymore in today's Linux / BSD / Unix-like systems, so most users won't have to bother with this at all.

      By default, QDirStat sums up the disk space for a file with multiple hard links for each hard link's share of the overall size: If a file with 1 MB has 4 hard links, for each of those 4 links QDirStat adds 1/4 of the size (i.e., 256 kB) to the parent directory. If all those 4 links are in the same directory, that's very simple: They add up to 4 * 256 kB = 1 MB, so the sum is correct.

      If those hard links are all in different directories, each directory only gets part of that disk space allocated, because in fact they share the disk space among each other; the total disk space sum taking all those directories into account is still correct, of course.

      The trouble starts when you want to make a backup of only one of those directories: Even though the disk space is still shared with other directories, on the backup medium, you still need the disk space for that complete file, i.e. the full 1 MB, not only that directory's share (256 kB). With a lot of hard-linked files, that can add up to a lot of difference between what QDirStat displays and what disk space you actually need for the backup.

      There was a user who makes heavy use of that, and for that kind of use case there is now the option to ignore hard links: In that case, QDirStat sums up the complete size (the full 1 MB) for each hard link of the file.

      While that is useful for this special case, and you can now see the total size that you will need for your backup medium for that one directory, the total size higher up in the directory tree where more than one of those directories that share hard linked files with each other is off: That file now appears 4 times with 1 MB each, so it will add up to 4 MB.

      There is now a new config option in ~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf:

      [DirectoryTree]
...
IgnoreHardLinks=false

      This is intentionally not available in the GUI config dialog to avoid confusion; use a text editor (while QDirStat is not running) to change this setting.

      Please use that config option only when you are aware of the consequences; this is a specialized option for rare, specialized use cases. It basically makes sense only if the other hard links are all outside the subtree that QDirStat displays.

      More details at GitHub Issue #124.

    • There is now a new document about Btrfs free size and how different tools tend to show different values: Btrfs-Free-Size.md

      Whenever users run out of disk space on Btrfs (which happens a lot, mostly because of snapshots) and they try to figure out where all their disk space went, they are confused about different tools reporting totally different and inconsistent sizes; traditional Linux / Unix command line tools like du and df just like GUI tools like QDirStat. Hopefully, this document will shed some light on that.

    Bug Fixes:

    • Fixed the internal cache writer (the one called from the File menu, not the qdirstat-cache-writer Perl script): For files with multiple hard links, it wrote the wrong size to the cache file: The result of size / links, not size.

      This was part of GitHub Issue #124.

    • Fixed crash when terminating with Ctrl-Q while reading directories (GitHub Issue #122).

    • Now automatically reopening the old current branch in the tree view when using actions like "refresh selected" and "continue reading at mount point (GitHub Issue #135).

    • Not a bug, but a minor new feature: Now automatically expanding the first directory level of a mount point after "continue reading at mount point".

    • Now correctly labelling a mount point as mount point in the "Details" panel.

  • 2020-06-14

    • Now displaying the allocated size for very small files (8 kB (2 clusters) or less) in a much more subdued way so it's still there, but less distracting.

    • If a file is wasting very much space (i.e. if it uses 33% or less of its allocated disk space), now displaying the allocated size in bold in the "Details" panel to draw more attention to the fact. This affects pretty much all tiny files with 1360 bytes or less since the cluster size of most (all?) Linux filesystem is so large (4 kB for ext4, XFS, Btrfs).

    Screenshot for both changes at GitHub Issue #134.

  • 2020-06-13

    • Now automatically reopening the old current branch in the tree view when using actions like "refresh selected" and "continue reading at mount point (GitHub Issue #135).

    • Now automatically expanding the first directory level of a mount point after "continue reading at mount point".

    • Now correctly labelling a mount point as mount point in the "Details" panel.

  • 2020-06-12

    • NTFS is now detected as "ntfs", no longer as "fuseblk" in the "Open Directory" and the "Filesystems" dialogs.

      This was fallout of GitHub Issue #88 (NTFS hard links).

    • Now ignoring hard links on NTFS; the (current?) ntfs-3g implementation using fuseblk seems to disagree with Windows tools which files really have hard links. And in this case I tend to have more faith in the Windows tools. Now the total sizes of my Windows partitions as reported by QDirStat are much closer to the sizes reported by the df command, the statfs() system call and QDirStat's new "Filesystems" window.

      See also GitHub Issue #88.

  • 2020-06-11

    • Fixed GitHub Issue #134: Size Difference between QDirStat Reports and the "du" and "df" Commands:

      • Now also showing the allocated size in the details panel for files and directory trees. This can make a a big difference if there are lots of tiny files.

      • Now showing the allocated size for directories in the tree view, not only the sum of all the byte sizes of all the files in the subtree.

      • Now using the allocated size in the treemap so tiny files appear with their true size, no longer disappearing in the grey background: A 6 bytes file is now displayed with the 4 KB that it actually consumes, not just the 6 bytes of its content.

      More information and lots of screenshots at GitHub Issue #134.

  • 2020-06-03

    • New "Mounted Filesystems" window ("View" -> "Show Mounted Filesystems" or Ctrl-M):

      This shows information about "normal" mounted filesystems (excluding system mounts like /dev, /proc, /sys, bind mounts, Btrfs subvolumes) with usage data as reported by the filesystem itself. The "Reserved" column shows the disk space reserved for the root user on that filesystem, "Free" is the available space for non-privileged users.

      Sometimes the "Used" size reported here may be quite different from what QDirStat reports after reading that complete filesystem; this can be due to metadata, journals or snapshots.

    • Added a document about Btrfs free size and how different tools tend to show different values: Btrfs-Free-Size.md

  • 2020-05-27

    • Implemented GitHub Issue #129: Option to continue reading at all mount points at once.

      Previously, you could choose to either always cross filesystems while reading directories, or you could later open the parent branch of the mount point in the tree view and then use "Continue reading at mount point" from the main menu / context menu.

      Now you can change this setting temporarily for the current program run; it will continue reading at "normal" mount points, i.e. excluding system mounts like /dev, /proc, /sys and also bind mounts or network mounts; but it still reads Btrfs subvolumes.

    • This new option needed a check box in the "Open Directory" dialog; so from now on, QDirStat no longer uses the generic Qt file dialog, it has a custom one:

      In addition to that new check box at the bottom, there is now also a new "places" widget for quick access to the user's home directory and all ("normal", see above) mounted filesystems, including network mounts (NFS, Samba / Cifs).

  • 2020-03-19

    • Added a config option to ignore hard links.

      This is useful for a very small number of use cases. Hard links are not very common anymore in today's Linux / BSD / Unix-like systems, so most users won't have to bother with this at all.

      By default, QDirStat sums up the disk space for a file with multiple hard links for each hard link's share of the overall size: If a file with 1 MB has 4 hard links, for each of those 4 links QDirStat adds 1/4 of the size (i.e., 256 kB) to the parent directory. If all those 4 links are in the same directory, that's very simple: They add up to 4 * 256 kB = 1 MB, so the sum is correct.

      If those hard links are all in different directories, each directory only gets part of that disk space allocated, because in fact they share the disk space among each other; the total disk space sum taking all those directories into account is still correct, of course.

      The trouble starts when you want to make a backup of only one of those directories: Even though the disk space is still shared with other directories, on the backup medium, you still need the disk space for that complete file, i.e. the full 1 MB, not only that directory's share (256 kB). With a lot of hard-linked files, that can add up to a lot of difference between what QDirStat displays and what disk space you actually need for the backup.

      There was a user who makes heavy use of that, and for that kind of use case there is now the option to ignore hard links: In that case, QDirStat sums up the complete size (the full 1 MB) for each hard link of the file.

      While that is useful for this special case, and you can now see the total size that you will need for your backup medium for that one directory, the total size higher up in the directory tree where more than one of those directories that share hard linked files with each other is off: That file now appears 4 times with 1 MB each, so it will add up to 4 MB.

      So please use that config option only when you are aware of the consequences; this is a specialized option for rare, specialized use cases. It basically makes sense only if the other hard links are all outside the subtree that QDirStat displays.

      If in doubt, leave this option off (which is the default).

      More details at GitHub Issue #124.

  • 2020-03-06

    • Fixed the internal cache writer (the one called from the File menu, not the qdirstat-cache-writer Perl script): For files with multiple hard links, it wrote the wrong size to the cache file: The result of size / links, not size.

      This was part of GitHub Issue #124.

  • 2020-02-24

  • 2020-02-13 New stable release: 1.6.1

    Summary:

    • Much better handling for "permission denied" errors while reading directories

    • Now showing the exact byte size (134 495 994 Bytes instead of 128.3 MB) upon mouse click in the tree (right click) and in the details panel (left or right click)

    • New optional tree column "Oldest File" (not enabled by default)

    • Bug fix: Support for dark widget themes in file size histogram window

    Details:

    • If you start QDirStat with insufficient permissions, you could easily overlook large subtrees in the filesystem that consume disk space, but were not visible to you. They did get a special icon, but you would have to open the parent directory in the tree view to see that.

      Now, QDirStat notifies you in several ways:

      • All parent directories that contain a subtree that could not be read are now displayed in dark red in the tree view.

      • The Size field of those directories as well as other accumulated values (Items, Files, Subdirs) are now preceded with a "greater than" sign to indicate that there is most likely more, but that information could not be retrieved: ">7.2 MB" indicating that it's at least 7.2 MB and most likely more than that, but we don't know because one or more subdirectories could not be read.

      • A message panel in the main window between the tree view and the treemap with a message that some directories could not be read.

        You can close the message with the [x] close button on its right side, but you can also simply leave it open. This is a lot less obtrusive than a pop-up dialog, yet less temporary than a message in the bottom status line that will disappear in a few seconds or when anything else is reported.

      • Clicking on the "Details..." link in that message opens a separate window to report all directories that could not be read (typically because of insufficient permissions).

        This window is non-modal, i.e. you can still interact with the main window when it is open. Click on any directory that it lists to locate it in the main window: The tree view will open that branch and scroll to make it visible.

      • In addition to the "locked folder" icon, unreadable directories are shown in bright red in the tree view.

      • When an unreadable directory is selected in the tree view, the details panel now shows a large padlock icon and a message "[Permission Denied]", and the permissions are highlighted in red.

    • You can now see the exact size in bytes both in the tree view and in the details panel: 134 495 994 Bytes instead of 128.3 MB. The field is still (somewhat) human readable with thousands separators (using blanks to avoid confusion with different decimal / thousands separators in different languages).

      This can make it easier to compare sizes with other tools that report them in bytes or that insist in using 1000-based units (QDirStat uses 1024-based size units: 1 kB = 1024 Bytes; 1 MB = 1024 kB; 1 GB = 1024 MB; etc.).

      Not using tool tips that appear automatically was a conscious decision: This level of detailed information is not needed that often, and tool tips get in the way whenever the mouse cursor lingers too long at an active spot. More often than not a tool tip obscurs other content that the user might want to read at that very moment. This is why in QDirStat in the rare cases that you are interested in those exact numbers, you have to click:

      • In the tree view, right-click a size field (a left click is used for selecting an item in tree views, so the context menu is pressed into service for that purpose (only for the size column)).

      • In the details panel, use left or right click. To indicate what fields can be clicked, they are now underlined when the mouse hovers over them.

        Hovering over fields that can be clicked shows them underlined, very much like a hyperlink.

        Clicking (left or right mouse button) shows more details: In this case, the exact byte size.

    • There is now an optional new column "Oldest File" that shows the timestamp (the mtime) of the oldest file in a subtree. This is strictly about files; directories, symlinks and special files (block or character devices, FIFOs etc.) are ignored for this.

      This may be useful to spot some old cruft, for example leftover dot files in your home directory. Many programs generate such files when you start them for the first time, and they are rarely cleaned up when they fall out of use.

      Notice that this column is not enabled by default. If you would like to use it, switch to layout L2 or L3, right-click the tree header to open the columns context menu, select Hidden Columns, then Show Column "Oldest File".

      Of course you can also sort by this column to see the oldest files first (or last).

    • Fixed text color in histogram in dark widget themes (GitHub Issue #117).

  • 2020-02-12

    • Fine-tuned error handling: If there is a "permission denied" error while reading a directory, this will now be shown much more clearly: There is now a clear distinction between "permission denied" any other generic "read error".

    • For directories that could not be read because of insufficient permissions, now also showing an additional "locked" icon in the details panel, and coloring the permissions field in red to point to the cause of the problem.

      This color can be configured in ~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf:

      [DetailsPanel]
DirReadErrColor=#ff0000

  • 2020-02-11

    • Now also showing the exact byte size of all size fields (of 1 kB and above) upon click in the "Details" panel. All clickable fields there are now underlined just like a hyperlink when the mouse hovers above them.

      I thought long and hard about using tool tips for that, but tool tips have a nasty habit of getting in the way and obscuring other information that the user might want to read; so I decided to use explicit mouse clicks.

      Hovering over fields that can be clicked shows them underlined, very much like a hyperlink.

    Clicking (left or right mouse button) shows more details: In this case, the exact byte size.

  • 2019-12-22

    • Brought back the exact byte size as the context menu for the "Size" column in the tree:

      I.e. a right click on the size now shows the exact number of bytes to avoid confusion between those people who know what a Megabyte or Gigabyte is and those who introduced the confusion with 1000-based units vs. the good old 1024-based units that everybody in IT uses (including Microsoft everywhere in all versions of Windows).

      Back in the early days of computing, everything was easy: a Kilobyte was 1024 bytes, a Megabyte was 1024 Kilobytes, and Gigabytes were Science Fiction. Then some morons came along who insisted on 1000-based units like everywhere in Physics. And they and the Real Engineers introduced a foul compromise: Rename 1024-based units to Kibibytes, Mibibytes etc. and redefine Kilobytes to be 1000 bytes, Megabytes to become 1000 Kilobytes etc.; since that day there is confusion what is what.

      QDirStat always used and always will use 1024-based units.

  • 2019-11-02

    • Added a separate window to report all directories that could not be read (typically because of insufficient permissions). This window is opened only on request: When the user clicks on the "Details..." link in the panel message that reports that some directories could not be read.

      This window is non-modal, i.e. you can still interact with the main window when it is open. Click on any directory that it lists to locate it in the main window.

    • Directories that could not be read are now also correctly reported in the unpackaged files view. Since they are empty when they could not be read, they will always end up in an <Ignored> branch which was previously not taken into account when reporting directories with read errors. This is now fixed.

  • 2019-08-24

    • If directories could not be read (typically because of insufficient permissions), now also posting a warning message in a new message panel.

      You can close the message with the [x] close button on its right side, but you can also simply leave it open. This is a lot less obtrusive than a pop-up dialog, yet less temporary than a message in the bottom status line that will disappear in a few seconds or when anything else is reported.

      The infrastructure for this enables multiple such messages that can be closed in any order (or not at all) as the user likes. Each message can have a "Details..." link (not used in these examples) to provide more information.

  • 2019-08-22

    • Improved handling for directories that could not be read.

      When you run QDirStat as a normal (non-root) user on system directories, it is very common that you get a "permission denied" error for directories that contain sensitive information. Such a directory gets a folder icon with a little lock to indicate that it's locked for you; there is no way to find out how much disk space it consumes.

      Now, such directories are also displayed in a special color (for now bright red) in the tree. All their parents are now displayed in another (slightly less obtrusive) color to indicate that you probably don't see the complete disk space information for that subdirectory.

      In those examples, The /etc/ssl/private directory does not have read permissions for non-root users; note the icon with the lock and the red text color.

      When you don't open that branch in the tree, you might not realize this; it's also in the log file, but most users don't read that. So its parent directories /etc/ssl and /etc are also displayed in a different color: Dark red in the light widget theme and yellow in the dark widget theme.

      In addition to that, the parent directories now show a > prefix for the size, number of items, number of files, number of subdirs fields to indicate that there may be more. This is a hint (not only, but also) for color blind users.

  • 2019-08-12

    • Toned down over-information to reduce clutter:

      • No longer showing column "Oldest File" in layout L2 by default.

        Of course, you can always re-enable this if you like: Just switch to layout L2, right-click on the column header to open the column context menu, then "Hidden Columns" -> "Show Column 'Oldest File'".

      • Removed "Oldest File" from the details panel for directories:

        I found that this does not contribute any useful information here, yet it adds to the screen clutter. Information about the oldest file in a subtree is useful to drill down deeper into the subtree to find it, so the tree view is much better suited for that; having that information in the details panel as well does not add any value for that procedure.

  • 2019-08-03

  • 2019-08-01

    • Added a column "Oldest File" that shows the timestamp (the mtime) of the oldest file in a subtree. This is strictly about files; directories, symlinks and special files (block or character devices, FIFOs etc.) are ignored for this.

      This is the first simple approach for GitHub Issue #118. (Click for screenshot)

      This already helped me to spot some old cruft in my home directory; some dot directories from ancient versions of flashplayer and whatnot. This is more helpful than I initially thought.

    • Added an entry "Oldest File" that does the same in the details panel for directories and packages.

  • 2019-07-22 New stable release: V1.6

    • Performance improvement while reading directories: On average 25% faster on normal (non-SSD) disks

      See also this article: Linux Disk Usage Tools Compared: QDirStat vs. K4DirStat vs. Baobab vs. Filelight vs. ncdu including benchmarks

    • Vast performance improvement for huge directories (with 100.000 entries or more in a single directory) in the tree view: There is now instant response for jumping from the first to the last item, dragging the scroll bar or using the mouse wheel.

    • New packages view: QDirStat can now visualize the file lists of installed packages:

      I.e. files are now grouped by the package they belong to, and in each subtree only the files that belong to the package are displayed: In this example, in /usr/bin only the chromium-browser binary is displayed, not all the other files in /usr/bin. This is intentional.

      You can display all installed packages with their file lists (but that takes a while), or you can select just a subset. Use Menu File -> Show Installed Packages or start QDirStat with a pkg:/ command line argument.

      As with the other package manager related features, this is supported for all Linux distributions that use one of dpkg, rpm or pacman (or any higher-level package manager based on any of those like apt, zypper etc.).

      More details at Pkg-View.md.

    • New unpackaged files view:

      QDirStat can now visualize the files in system directories that are not packaged, i.e. that are not part of any file list of any installed software package.

      This can be useful to track down problems after package upgrades or after manually installing software with sudo make install.

      This is supported for all Linux distributions that use dpkg or rpm (or any higher-level package manager based on any of those like apt, zypper etc.).

      More details at Unpkg-View.md.

    • New standard cleanup: Check File Type. This uses the file command to find out more detailed information what exactly a file is and displays it in the cleanup output window.

      More details, screenshots and how to get it if you already have an existing QDirStat cleanup configuration file (i.e. if you used QDirStat before): GitHub Issue #102.

    • Implemented GitHub Issue #90: Support excluding directories containing a file with a specific name or pattern.

      Similar to some backup tools, you can now specify an exclude rule that lets you exclude a directory that contains a file like .nobackup or .qdirstatexclude.

    • Greatly improved the man page; see man 1 qdirstat.

    • Some bug fixes.

    See also the release announcement.

  • 2019-07-18

    • Greatly improved the man page; see man 1 qdirstat.

      It started with the Debian maintainer of QDirStat asking for a man page because that's a standard requirement for Debian packages, and he even wrote the initial one; thanks again, Patrick!.

      That initial man page was very concise, and as QDirStat keeps evolving, not only was there an increasing number of command line options that was not documented in the man page (but of course when invoking the program with the --help command line option), but it also didn't explain much beyond the command line arguments.

      Now it contains not only the latest set of command line arguments including syntax and meaning of pkg:/ and unpkg:/ URLs, but also some general information what the program is (including what the treemap is) and how to use it.

  • 2019-07-08

    New unpackaged files view:

    QDirStat can now visualize the files in system directories that are not packaged, i.e. that are not part of any file list of any installed software package.

    This reads the complete file lists first (i.e. all file lists from all installed packages), then reads the requested directory as usual and puts the files that are packaged in a special branch <Ignored> in the tree view.

    Those files are not displayed in the treemap, i.e. the treemap now only contains unpackaged files.

    What is this Good For?

    • Recovering a wrecked system after botched upgrades

    • Recovering from too much sudo make install

    • Fixing packaging problems, e.g. find leftover shared libs that tend to get in the way

    • QA for distro release managers, QA engineers, PMs

    • Satisfying user curiosity

    • Because we can! ;-)

    More details at Unpkg-View.md.

    Comments and questions are welcome at GitHub Issue #110.

    If you have a genuine problem with the new feature, please open a separate issue so it can be tracked properly.

  • 2019-06-16

    • Added documentation for the pkg-tools scripts.

      In short, they can be used to see unpackaged files on a system that uses one of the supported package managers (dpkg, rpm, pacman), but it's a bit of a clunky solution, so this is meant for advanced users only.

      With a little bit of luck, there may be a better solution forthcoming with real integration into QDirStat's GUI.

      Update 2019-07-08: This real integration into the GUI is now available.

  • 2019-05-12

    • New standard cleanup: Check File Type. This uses the file command to find out more detailed information what exactly a file is and displays it in the normal cleanup output window (the orange text is the interesting part).

      More details and screenshots at GitHub Issue #102. Notice that you can also add this to any older version of QDirStat.

  • 2019-05-11

    • Implemented the single-command call to get all file lists for all installed packages for rpm as well.

      Now it's only pacman that still needs a separate external command for each package. If anybody knows how to do this for pacman as well, please let me know.

    • Another drastic performance improvement in the packages view:

      Now down to 6.5 seconds on my system from initially 180 seconds for getting all file lists for all 2400 installed packages.

      sec Version Description
      180.0 ce3e793298 First pkg view; sequential separate dpkg -L calls
      53.4 68038f0525 Separate dpkg -L calls in multiple background processes
      38.5 ce54879a48 Single dpkg -S "*" call to get all file lists for all pkg at once
      37.7 45b0a7a941 Use cache for lstat() syscalls
      24.6 c50e9a7686 Use slower update timer for tree view while reading
      6.5 a1043a20fb Keep tree collapsed during reading

      (Much) more details at GitHub Issue #101.

  • 2019-05-10

    Drastic performance improvements in the packages view:

    • When reading many (configurable; right now 200) package lists, QDirStat no longer fires off a separate background process (6 in parallel at any given time) for each external command (dpkg-query --listfiles or rpm -ql or pacman -Qlp) and collects their output.

      Rather, it now tries to use a single external command that can return all file lists for all packages at once. It builds a cache from that and uses it to build the internal tree as it processes the read jobs for each package one by one.

      Right now this works for dpkg (dpkg -S "*"). Experiments show that it will also work for rpm (that's on the to do list).

      But there does not seem to be an equivalent command for pacman; it looks as if pacman can only return a file list for a single package or a list of all installed packages, but without any reference what package each file in that list belongs to. If anybody knows, please contact me.

    • Now caching the result of lstat() syscalls for directories in the package view since most packages share common system directories like /usr, /usr/bin, /usr/share etc.; lstat() is an expensive affair, and even just avoiding to switch from user space to kernel space and back that often is a speed improvement.

    • Reduced the display update interval in the packages view. While reading package information, there is not all that much to see anyway. Yet constantly recalculating the column widths to make sure they fit their content is expensive. This is now done just every 5 seconds, not 3 times a second.

      There is even a noticeable difference when using the L1 layout and a smaller window size so there is less content to take care of.

    The net effect of all this performance tuning is that on my machine (Xubuntu 18.04 LTS (i.e. dpkg) with ~2400 packages) reading all packages with all their file lists is now down to under 30 seconds from formerly 90 to 120 (it varied wildly).

  • 2019-05-09

    • Now no longer showing a directory's own size (the size of the directory node, not of any file contained in the directory) in the packages view: This distorted both the treemap and the total sums. Directories are typically shared between a lot of packages, so it does not make very much sense to add the size of a very common directory like /usr/bin or /usr/lib to the total size of each package that owns a file in any of them, thus accounting for those directories many times. On my system, /usr/bin is shared between 454 packages, so its 68 kB would be added up 454 times, thus adding up to 30 MB.

      In the treemap that meant that packages that install only one or two very small files (symlinks!) to a very common directory would show a lot of empty space; the 56 byte (or so) symlink would be completely dwarfed by the directory it is in, even if the directory only has 4 kB. A lot of such lone small files each in a separate directory meant a whole lot of empty space in the treemap, thus making packages very hard to compare against each other.

      Of course this means that the size of the directory nodes is now completely missing in the toplevel total sum (the Pkg:/ node in the tree), but that is much less distorting than multiplying each of those directory node sizes by the number of packages that have files in each of them.

    • No longer regarding the directory's own mtime (modification time) in the packages view: The latest overall mtime in a subtree cascades upward, so any change in any subtree would affect the latest mtime in the higher tree levels. But if that change was caused by something outside of the current view, this is irrelevant. So if you want to know the latest mtime anywhere in package foo which includes the /usr/bin/foo command, it is irrelevant if one hour ago you installed or updated some other package which also installed some other commands to /usr/bin; you don't want that latest mtime of the /usr/bin directory to affect the display of every package that has a file in /usr/bin.

  • 2019-05-04

    New packages view: QDirStat can now visualize the file lists of installed packages:

    I.e. files are now grouped by the package they belong to, and in each subtree only the files that belong to the package are displayed: In this example, in /usr/bin only the chromium-browser binary is displayed, not all the other files in /usr/bin. This is intentional.

    You can display all installed packages with their file lists (but that takes a while), or you can select just a subset. Use Menu File -> Show Installed Packages or start QDirStat with a pkg:/ command line argument.

    As with the other package manager related features, this is supported for all Linux distributions that use one of dpkg, rpm or pacman (or any higher-level package manager based on any of those like apt, zypper etc.).

    More details at Pkg-View.md.

    Comments and questions are welcome at GitHub Issue #100.

    If you have a genuine problem with the new feature, please open a separate issue so it can be tracked properly.

  • 2019-04-12

    • Performance improvement while reading directories: 25% faster on my /work directory with an ext4 filesystem with 230 GB / 216k items on a rotational (non-SSD) disk; with cleared caches now 24.5 sec average compared to previously 32.5 sec average (with filled caches down to 1.5 from previously 2.0 sec).

      It now uses fstatat() (instead of lstat()) which accepts the file descriptor of an open directory, so glibc and the kernel save the time previously needed for parsing the path and locating the directory; that part will also bring some speed improvement for SSDs.

      In addition to that, the entries for each directory are now sorted by i-no before calling fstatat() so the kernel can now read the i-nodes on disk in sequential order, thus saving disk seek times. SSD users will not benefit from that since there are no disk seek times on an SSD.

    • Now using the name as the secondary sort field in the tree view if the primary sort field (usually the size) is equal for two items.

    • Vast performance improvement for huge directories (with 100.000 entries or more in a single directory) in the tree view: There is now instant response for jumping from the first to the last item, dragging the scroll bar or using the mouse wheel.

      It had turned out that by default the underlying QTreeView widget queries each item in turn how tall it wants to become (using the sizeHint()) which in turn had to query the font for each one for its metrics.

      QDirStat now sets the QTreeView's uniformRowHeights flag to indicate that all rows have the same height, so this only needs to be done for the first one, and the result is simply multiplied by the number of items.

      Amazingly enough it was not sorting the items (which is what comes to mind when there is such a performance bottleneck), no, it was something as mundane as the widget having to figure out the proportions of its scroll bar slider vs. the scroll bar overall length. And for that, it needs to know the number of items (which is simple) and the height of each one (which was not).

      The reason why the widget does that is because each item might have a different font or a different icon, and then each item might have a different height. That uniformRowHeights flag tells it that this is not the case.

  • 2019-04-06

    • New article Linux Disk Usage Tools Compared: QDirStat vs. K4DirStat vs. Baobab vs. Filelight vs. ncdu including benchmarks: GitHub Issue #97

      (written in the GitHub issue tracker so users can join the discussion)

  • 2019-04-05

    • Performance boost for huge directories (with 100.000 entries or more in a single directory):

      A routine that counts the direct children of a directory now uses a cached value for each directory so it does not have to be recalculated over and over again even if nothing changed. Amazingly enough, this little thing had turned out to be the performance bottleneck that had made QDirStat prohibitively slow for such directories. It was not the sorting of the entries (the sort order was always cached), no, the problem was something as trivial as counting the children on the current level of the tree view.

      Of course, a directory that contains 100.000 entries in a single level still has quite some performance impact, but at least now it's tolerable. This was tested with up to 500.000 entries in a single directory (there is now a script that can create such a directory in the test/util directory of the source tree).

      Hint: Avoid dragging the vertical scroll bar of the tree view in such a directory; better use keyboard commands such as the Home or the End key. The scroll bar will make the underlying Qt widget go through every single entry in turn, and that will take a while (it will eventually become responsive again, though).

      Update 2019-04-12: This is now no longer an issue; using uniformRowHeights fixed that.

    • Implemented GitHub Issue #90: Support excluding directories containing a file with a specific name or pattern.

      Similar to some backup tools, you can now specify an exclude rule that lets you exclude a directory that contains a file like .nobackup or .qdirstatexclude. The exclude rule configuration now has a new option for that:

      This makes it possible to reuse such files that are there anyway for some other tool and get a good idea how large the resulting backup will become.

      Since this change required some refactoring in a quite sensitive part (reading the directories), please watch out for possible bugs that this might have introduced and report it if you find something.

  • 2018-11-07 New stable release: V1.5

    Summary:

    • (Optional) breadcrumbs navigation

    • (Optional) a new "details" panel for the currently selected item

    • (Optional) new tree columns: owner, group, permissions both in "rwxrwxrwx" and in octal format

    • Package manager support for the major Linux package managers (dpkg / rpm / pacman) to see what package a system file belongs to.

    • Quick-switchable different layouts for the main window

    • A new "General" page in the configuration dialog

    • Show in the window title if the program runs with root permissions (sudo etc.)

    • (Optional) show the URL in the window title

    • Some bug fixes

    For more details, see the full release announcement.

  • 2018-11-03

    Added showing release notes (in an external web browser) to the "Help" menu ("What's New in this Release").

  • 2018-10-26

    The pre-1.5 Beta is out: QDirStat-1.4.97-Beta

  • 2018-10-21

    • Updated all screenshots to the latest Git source version in preparation for the upcoming pre-1.5 Beta.

    • Added a little left margin to the "Latest MTime" column in the tree to make it look less overcrowded.

  • 2018-10-20

    • Reintroduced showing the elapsed time during directory reading.

      You might have noticed that QDirStat's performance has decreased with all the kernel patches to work around the Meltdown and Spectre security problems caused by CPU design; system calls have become a lot more expensive in terms of performance now. And QDirStat does a LOT of system calls while reading directories: opendir() / readdir() for each directory in the tree and lstat() for every single file or directory found in the tree: My 6.8 GB root filesystem has 275,000 items total and 25,500 directories which means well over 300,000 system calls. Every single one of them now causes kernel page tables to be cleared and restored for every switch between user space and kernel space, and that means quite some performance impact.

      This all means that it's now worthwhile again to display the elapsed time during directory reading. It used to be over in a heartbeat, so it wasn't worthwhile to display that; but that's different now.

    • Added a General page to the configuration dialog for miscellaneous settings.

      This is a bit unorganized (as might be expected for misc settings), but those misc settings had accumulated over time, so I decided to finally add such a page.

      The settings were always accessible, but only by editing the config file (~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf) manually. For some settings you might still have to do that: Some are too exotic for general use, some others would confuse the average user much more than they would help.

  • 2018-10-19

    • Added different layouts to the main window:

      You can now switch between three (at the moment) different layout options for the upper half of QDirStat's main window.

      • Layout 1 (short): Display only a bare minimum of columns in the tree view, but show the new details panel on the right side. This is to minimize clutter in the tree view, yet keep all the information available.

      • Layout 2 (classic): Display the same columns as always in the tree view and additionally the new details panel on the right side.

      • Layout 3 (full): Display all available columns in the tree view, including the new file owner, group, permissions in both "rwxrwxrwx" and octal. But don't display the new display side panel so there is enough screen space to show all those columns.

      Switching between the layouts is as easy as pressing one of the three new buttons in the tool bar: L1, L2, L3. Or use the corresponding entries in the "View" menu. Or use the Alt-1, Alt-2, Alt-3 key combinations.

      For each view, you can individually configure what columns to display and whether or not to display the new details side panel and / or the new breadcrumbs navigator.

      The column widths are still configured globally (and this will remain like that); I experimented with that and found it very awkward to have to set all of them individually for each layout.

    • We are approaching a new release (I guess you figured that with all the recent changes). Most likely there will be at least one Beta release (if there are problems maybe more) before the 1.5-stable release.

    • There is still some (limited) time to add even more package managers if anybody feels inclined to submit patches. But please be advised that I can't do much maintenance for any of those since I don't have any system with them readily available to test anything; the ones that I have use dpkg or rpm.

    • Fixed GitHub Issue #86: CacheWriter errors go unnoticed much too easily.

      This was a direct result of me giving in to nagging people wanting features of very limited value: The status bar flickering like crazy all the time because somebody back some time ago had wanted the current treemap tile's path and size in the status bar as the mouse hovers over it. GitHub Issue #30

      The effect is that nobody pays attention anymore at all to that status bar because it's flickering all the time anyway, so it has become useless as a tool to report anything of importance; and status bar messages are gone immediately, too, when the user happens to move the mouse across the treemap.

      As a consequence, I just disabled that by default; if anybody really wants it, edit the QDirStat config file (~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf) and enable it again:

      UseTreemapHover=true

      Update 2018-10-20: This can now be changed in the new "General" page of the configuration dialog; no need to edit the config file manually.

  • 2018-10-18

    • Added support for the pacman package manager for Manjaro and Arch Linux.

      This should now cover the most common package managers for Linux to find out what package a system file belongs to: dpkg, rpm, pacman.

      As mentioned before, higher-level package managers such as apt, zypper, yum or front-ends like synaptic, PackageKit all use one of the lower-level package managers internally, so it doesn't matter if you never used one of the lower-level tools before.

    • Tried to add support for the pkg package manager ("pkg info") for FreeBSD / OpenBSD, but unfortunately it only knows what package owns files of ports / 3rd party, not for the base system.

      The helpful people in the #freebsd IRC channel on freenode confirmed that. So this will have to wait until there is useful support for it from the system side on those platforms. BSD people, let me know!

  • 2018-10-16

    • QDirStat now shows [root] in the window title if it is running with root privileges.

    • If invoked with sudo, now restoring the owner of the config files to the real user (if possible) if those file are in the user's home directory. Previously on some systems they were owned by root which meant they were no longer writable by the real user, silently discarding all subsequent changes to the configuration (including window sizes etc).

      This might be different depending on how sudo is configured on a system; on SUSE, it uses the root user's home directory, on Ubuntu, the home directory of the user who invoked sudo.

  • 2018-10-07

    Added better classification of files to the new file details view:

    • MIME Category - this is the same as in the treemap colors, the same as you can configure in the MIME Categories page in the QDirStat configuration dialog. By default, it shows very broad categories ("Documents, "Music", "Images", "Videos", "Source Files", ...), but you can configure them to much finer detail if you wish.

    • System file or not. This is important if you want to run any cleanup actions in that directory; you probably don't want to mess with system files, even if running QDirStat as root.

      A system file in this context is a file that is either owned by a system user (a UID < 500) or that is located in a known system directory (/usr, /lib, ..., but not /usr/local).

    • For system files, the package that this file belongs to. This gives a surprising amount of insight (it was surprising to me, at least) where all the disk space on the system directories goes to, most importantly some of the big blobs in the tremap.

      As of now, this is supported for Linux systems using a package manager based on dpkg or on rpm:

      • Debian

      • Ubuntu / Kubuntu / Xubuntu / Lubuntu

      • SUSE (openSUSE Tumbleweed or Leap, SLES)

      • Red Hat (Fedora, RHEL)

      ... and dozens more (basically all that are based on any of the above).

      This works by running dpkg -S or rpm -qf as external commands, so this is a somewhat expensive operation. To keep the user interface responsive, QDirStat now has an "adaptive timer" for updating that information: Normally, the result is shown instantly, but if you click around wildly, there is a timer that is increased or decreased (thus "adaptive") for a delayed update after that timeout (0 / 333 / 1000 / 2500 millisec right now).

      It can even handle rpm installed as a foreign package manager on a dpkg based system (and the other way round); it tries the primary package manager first, then any others that are also installed.

      Please notice that apt, synaptic, zypper, pkgkit and whatnot are all higher level package managers that ultimately use one of the low level ones, so even if you only use a higher level package manager, it still works without restriction.

      If your system does not use dpkg or rpm, those who can are invited to contribute patches for other package managers; it's really simple:

      https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/src/PkgManager.cpp#L140

      The API is not final yet; there may be more regexp support in the near future (so it will only get simpler). But you get the idea.

  • 2018-10-03

    • Added a new details view next to the tree view. Of course this can be disabled (Menu View -> uncheck Show Details Panel).

      This view shows context-sensitive information about the currently selected item(s); see also the screenshots (still not complete, but you get the idea):

      What that details view displays so far:

      • File: name, type (file / symlink / block device / character device / FIFO), size, user, group, permissions both as rwxrwxrwx and octal, modification time.

      • Directory: name with appended slash to easier recognize what it is, type (directory), subtree total size, total items, total files, total subdirs, latest modification time in the entire subtree; directory own size, user, group, permissions both as rwxrwxrwx and octal, modification time of the directory node itself (that was never shown before).

      • pseudo directory: Only the subtree information like for a directory, but no user / group / permissions since there is no counterpart for it on the filesystem.

      • Multi-selection: Number of selected items, total size, number of files, number of directories, number of files in any subtrees of those directories. This should show a bit more clearly what is affected if you choose to delete all that selected stuff.

      The view can scroll, so extremely long file names (as are common e.g. below .git/objects directories don't blow this view up to take all the screen space away from the tree and the treemap.

    • Unified the different size columns into one: No more "Subtree Size" and "Own Size" separately, but now just "Size". The reasoning used to be that there was no way to tell how large the directory node itself was. But that information is now readily available in the details view if anybody is really interested.

    Plans for the immediate future:

    • Add some package manager support, at least for the very common ones on Linux (deb and rpm so far): Find out what package a system file belongs to and show it (on demand or after a short delay) in the details view. This can be done even as non-root with some commands like dpkg -S or rpm -qf. There will probably be support for adding your own command lines in the config file if you use another package manager.

    • Some simple checks if a file is probably a system file; for example, files below /usr/bin (and other very common system directories) and/or files that are owned by a user with a UID < 500 (or so) are very likely system files that should be very careful to delete. The details view should show you that; maybe there should also be a warning in the cleanup actions if any such files are affected by a potentially destructive cleanup action.

    • Easily switchable different layouts for the tree columns and the details view:

      • Minimalistic: Only the bare essentials of columns plus the details view.

        This should remove a lot of the current clutter on the screen, and it should display the same information, only rearranged a bit. How often do you really need fields like number of items / files / subdirs in the tree view? They would be most useful there if you wish to sort the tree after any of them. How often do you do that? And with the new details view, the information is still available, but does not clutter the table.

      • Default: Pretty much what you can see now in the new screenshots

      • Maximum information: All columns, including the new user / group / permissions columns, but (to make space) no details view

      If it makes sense (not sure yet), maybe also user defined views (say, 3 of them?) that you can define to your personal liking. I kinda like how camera makers use that (U1 / U2 on Nikon cameras, C1 / C2 / C3 on Canon and Panasonic). I am not completely sure yet just how useful that is; I'll need to experiment.

  • 2018-10-02 Implemented a breadcrumbs widget to show the current path and for easier navigation up the directory hierarchy. See also the new screenshots.

    Of course this can be disabled (Menu View -> uncheck Show Current Path).

  • 2018-09-27 Fixed GitHub issue #84: Crash if picking up a cache file in the starting directory (subtree root).

    This was a crash that happened when users had used the supplied qdirstat-cache-writer script to generate cache files in certain directories for faster directory scanning (at the price of having slightly outdated data), and QDirStat was not started with that cache file as a command line argument, but it would find it while reading the directory at the starting directory (and only there). This was probably broken for a long time, yet nobody had noticed (or nobody bothered to write a bug report). This might be an indication that this cache file feature is not widely used, so only a small number of users seem to be affected. Anyway, this is now fixed.

  • 2018-09-23 Implemented GitHub issue #80: Show directory/file user (owner), group and permissions in the tree view.

    Those new columns are not visible by default. Use the context menu in the tree columns header to enable them. They might be useful for some users; for others, they may be just more clutter being displayed.

    Sorting by those columns is somewhat basic; both user and group are sorted by the numeric uid or guid; the permissions are sorted by the numeric value of the mode field. Looking up user or group names is a somewhat costly operation. It might also make sense to order system files first (user with UID 0, i.e. root; other system users also have small UIDs.)

    See issue #80 for a screenshot.

  • 2018-08-26 Noah Davis (noahdvs) contributed a new application icon for QDirStat:

    I had made the old icon myself back in early 2000 for the first KDirStat 0.86 release. I never liked it very much, but the new application just needed an icon. Finally somebody with more artistic talent than myself made one that looks a lot more professional. Thank you, Noah!

  • 2018-04-26 Implemented GitHub issue #77: Show the current URL in the window title. This is disabled by default. You can enable it manually in the config file (~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf):

    [MainWindow]
...
UrlInWindowTitle=true

    Some day this will be configurable in a new tab in the configuration dialog, but right now there are only so few options that would go to such a "General" or "Misc" tab that it would look pretty lost and unorganized.

  • 2018-02-08 Fixed GitHub issue #74: Crash deleting folder while scan is in progress

    This fix comes on two levels:

    • A fix on the GUI-level that simply makes sure that the "move to trash" action in the tool bar / context menu is disabled while a directory tree is read.

    • A fix on the low-level internal classes for the in-memory directory tree and the read job queue: This now also makes sure that whenever a subtree is deleted from the outside (e.g. because of cleanup actions), any pending directory read jobs for that subtree are removed from the job queue.

  • 2018-02-03 Fixed GitHub issue #72: Allow to specify install prefix

    You can now install to another location like /usr/local if desired. The default remains /usr. See section Install to a Custom Directory.

  • 2018-01-12 Some small fixes:

    • Fixed duplicate keyboard shortcut for actions "Stop Reading" (now: Ctrl-S) and "Copy URL to Clipboard" (still Ctrl-C).

    • Fixed exclude rules not matching correctly against direct root directory children: A rule that should match "/var" now works correctly. You'd need to specify "//var" in the rule which of course was wrong.

    • Now only adding the default exclude rule ".snapshot" once. If you remove that one, it should no longer keep reappearing if there are no other exclude rules.

    • Fixed some minor issues in the exclude rule configuration dialog with some widgets not being correctly disabled if they made no sense to use.

  • 2017-06-04 New stable release: V1.4

    It's about time to ship all those latest changes.

  • 2017-06-04 Fixed problem with directories that have read, but not execute permissions thanks to slodki:

    In that case, you'd get a warning in the log for every entry in such a directory, and it would get the wrong icon (a locked folder) and null values for all fields. Now checking for execute and read permission of the directory in advance and not even trying to read any contents (because the values would be bogus anyway).

  • 2017-05-31 Fixed GitHub Issue #61: Files and directories with UTF-8 special characters in the name not read correctly when built with Qt 4.x

    This happened only when QDirStat was built against Qt 4.x, but that is the default for NHellFire's PPA, so this affects all Ubuntu users who installed QDirStat from that PPA.

    Thanks to slodki who pointed this problem out!

  • 2017-05-12 Checked code with Coverity

    Coverity offers free static code analysis for Open Source projects. This is really an outstanding tool, and it does a really thorough analysis.

    You might be glad to hear that while it complained about some minor things, there was not a single issue that would have been user relevant (let alone any security problems - there were none). Still, I did my best to fix the small complaints it had, and now we are down to zero outstanding defects reported by Coverity in QDirStat's 130,000 lines of code.

  • 2017-04-21 More consistency between file type and size statistics

    Like the new file size statistics window, the older file type statistics window now uses the currently selected directory (in the tree view), not always the tree's toplevel directory. If nothing is selected, it still uses the toplevel directory.

    That means that F3 no longer toggles that window, but re-populates it with the currently selected directory instead. This is consistent with the F2 view.

    Of course, the "Locate Files by Type" window now is also restricted to that subtree which actually gives it better functionality if you know that you want to locate files only there.

    This means that you can now select a subdirectory in the tree, open the file type statistics for it (F3 key), then select any filename extension (suffix) in that window and then open the file size statistics (F2 key) for that file type in that subtree.

    Previously, you would have to start QDirStat to show only that directory, then open the file type statistics window (F3), then the file size statistics window (F2) from there.

  • 2017-04-14 Let's do some real statistics

    It's been a while since the last official news here, but I wasn't idle during that time:

    File Size Histogram Screenshot

    This is a whole new kind of statistics in QDirStat showing how file sizes are distributed. You can start that for any selected directory (menu View -> File Size Statistics or F2) or from the _File Type Statistics" window if you select any filename suffix (extension) there and then File Type -> Size Statistics (or F2). In the latter case, you can see how large all your photos (.jpg), your videos (.mp4) or whatever are.

    This new statistics window deals with a lot of things you might have come to hate at school or at university, and which your math teacher or your statistics professor never explained in a way that mere mortals can understand, so I added those explanations as a bonus. There is a landing page for that in that new window:

    File Size Help

    Or you might use this as a starting point.

    Everybody thinking "I have no clue what this is all about", please have a look at the Median, Quartiles and Percentiles Explained document to convince yourself that really everybody can easily understand this.

    I also opened a GitHub issue to discuss this; comments are welcome.

  • 2017-03-10 Filling the gaps in the treemap

    GitHub issue #58 shows that users feel under-informed when there are grey areas in the treemap. The explanation is simple: Treemap tiles are only displayed when they have at least a certain minimum size (by default 3 pixels). Otherwise the treemap just gets cluttered with tiny things that don't show any information whatsoever.

    The remaining space is taken by its parent directory's tile. They were rendered just flat grey which makes their boundaries against each other invisible, thus giving the impression that there is nothing.

    So I experimented with visible borders, but that completely destroyed the visual impression of the treemap because those borders were everywhere. Fill patterns also didn't help: They were just ugly, and there was no way to tell where one directory tile ends and where the next one starts.

    Then I tried gradients. The first impression was good, but then I found that it was hard to tell which item was a (now over-emphasized) directory and which one a large file. Locating large files deep inside the directory hierarchy is the major strong point of the treemap visualization, so I wouldn't want to give that up. After playing a bit with the gradient parameters (toning it down and giving it just a little blueish tint) I ended up with this:

    Using Gradients

    I think this is a good compromise.

    Of course this is configurable: Edit ~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf:

    [Treemaps]
...
DirGradientEnd=#707080
DirGradientStart=#606070
...
UseDirGradient=true

    Beware that QSettings sorts the entries alphabetically, so the start is after the end (how philosophical...).

  • 2017-03-05 New stable release: V1.3

  • 2017-02-27 Implemented GitHub issue #30:

    When hovering over a treemap tile, display the full path and the total size of that element in the status bar. When the hover ends (when the mouse cursor leaves the treemap tile), display the current selection again in the status bar.

  • 2017-02-24 Improved logging: More secure and automatically log-rotating.

    QDirStat now uses its own log directory /tmp/qdirstat-$USER (where $USER is your user name; the numeric user ID is now only used if the user name cannot be obtained). It no longer keeps one single log file growing, but starts a new one each time it is started. 3 old logs are kept; any older ones are deleted.

    The permissions for that directory are set up in a pretty restrictive way (0700, i.e. rwx------) when it is created. If it already exists, QDirStat checks the owner and creates a new one with a random name if it is owned by anyone else than the user who started QDirStat.

    [sh @ balrog] ~ 68 % ls -ld /tmp/qdirstat-sh
drwx------ 2 sh sh 4096 Feb 24 18:29 /tmp/qdirstat-sh
[sh @ balrog] ~ 69 % ls -l /tmp/qdirstat-sh
total 16
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sh sh 2067 Feb 24 18:29 qdirstat-00.old
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sh sh 2067 Feb 24 18:07 qdirstat-01.old
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sh sh 2067 Feb 24 18:07 qdirstat-02.old
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sh sh 2067 Feb 24 18:29 qdirstat.log

    For anybody regularly watching the log file this means they will now have to use tail -F qdirstat.log rather than tail -f since the latter does not realize when the file it watches is renamed and a new one is created under the same name.

  • 2017-02-23 Fixed GitHub issue #24:

    During directory reading, subdirectories would get out of sync when opening a tree branch.

    It looks like QDirStat's tree display was a bit too dynamic for the concepts of the underlying Qt classes (QTreeView / QAbstractItemModel): During reading, QDirStat would sort the tree by the number of pending read jobs. That number is constantly changing, so the sort order would also constantly need to change. This is very hard to do properly with the limitations those underlying classes impose; basically it would require a reset of all the data the QTreeView keeps, thus making it forget things like its current scrollbar position or which tree branches were expanded or collapsed. That would make the user interface pretty much unusable.

    So the fix for this is to not sort by read jobs, but by directory names instead since they don't change all the time. The user can still sort by any other column, but that sort is a momentary thing that might become invalid moments later as data (accumulated sizes, number of child items) are updated. Everybody please notice that this is a known limitation and any complaints about that will flatly be rejected. The alternative would be to not allow the user to sort at all during directory reading, and that is certainly a lot less desirable.

  • 2017-02-22

    • @flurbius contributed a patch to switch the main window layout from tree view above and treemap below to side-by-side (Menu Treemap -> Treemap as Side Panel).

    • Added new document GitHub-Workflow.md explaining how to work with GitHub and Git to contribute to QDirStat.

  • 2017-02-20 Locating files by type from the File Type Statistics window

Locating FilesWindow

You can now locate files with a specific filename extension directly:

  • You select a file type (a filename extension) in the "File Type Statistics" window.

  • You click "Locate" or you double-click the item.

  • The "Locate Files" window opens.

  • You click a directory there.

  • In the main window, the branch for that directory opens, and all matching files are selected in the tree view and in the treemap.

  • You can now directly start cleanup actions for those files.

See also GitHub issue #48.

  • 2017-02-18 New document: QDirStat for Servers describing how to use QDirStat and the qdirstat-cache-writer script on headless (no X server, no X libs) servers.

  • 2017-02-17 File Type Statistics window merged to Git master

    Latest screenshot:

    File Type Statistics Window Screenshot

    Limitations:

    Since filename extensions (suffixes) don't have as much semantics in Linux/Unix systems as they do in Windows, many files are categorized as "Other". This is a known limitation, but it's a limitation of the whole concept of using suffixes to categorize files by type. And no, checking file headers for magic byte sequences like the "file" command does is not an option here; QDirStat would have to do that for (at least) all the 30,000+ files typically listed under the "Other" category. So we'll have to live with that limitation.

    Next thing to come: Locating files with a specific suffix from there. See GitHub issue #48.

  • 2017-02-12 Working on a File Type Statistics window

    People who know WinDirStat inevitably want that File Type view in QDirStat, too. I was really reluctant to do that because I didn't quite see the point; in WinDirStat, it serves mostly as a legend to the treemap colors since they are constantly changing in WinDirStat: The file type that consumes most disk space always gets color #1, the next-most color #2 etc., so it depends which directory you scan what color each file type gets. In QDirStat, the colors are stable; they are predefined and configurable in the MIME Type Categories configuration dialog.

    And as most of you probably know, filename extensions have a much stricter meaning in Windows than on Linux/Unix systems; Linux people get very creative when it comes to using dots in filenames. Sometimes those dots delimit a filename's extension (suffix) from its base name, sometimes they are used for entirely different purposes.

    Anyway, there was one user who was insistent enough to make me reconsider, and I did some experimenting this weekend, and now we have an (albeit still experimental) File Type Statistics view. So far, that code lives in a Git branch, but I think it will stabilize in the next one or two weeks, so I will merge it to Git master.

    See the whole discussion with more screenshots at GitHub issue #45

  • 2017-01-03 New stable release: V1.2

    Upgrading to this release is highly recommended for Btrfs users:

    If you used QDirStat to scan a Btrfs partition, any subvolumes of that partition were not scanned (see GitHub issue #39).

    Btrfs subvolumes were treated just like ordinary mount points (which, to all intents and purposes, they are). So you might have wondered why the df command shows your 40 GB root filesystem as 97% full, yet QDirStat shows only about 7 GB. The rest might be hidden in subvolumes.

    QDirStat stops reading at mount points - which only makes sense because normally you want to know what eats up the disk space on that one partition that is filling up, not on any others like /home that are mounted there. Unfortunately, a Btrfs subvolume is also just another mount point, and QDirStat would stop reading there, too - at /var/log, at /var/spool, at /var/lib/libvirt etc.; a typical Btrfs root filesystem has about a dozen subvolumes, and all files in them were disregarded by QDirStat.

    This is now fixed: Despite Btrfs doing its best to make this difficult (using one single privileged system call for all its functionality, including simple info calls), QDirStat now detects if a mount point is a Btrfs subvolume and continues reading if it is. QDirStat uses /proc/mounts (or, if this is not available, /etc/mtab) to find this out.

    This is fixed in the qdirstat-cache-writer script, too.

  • 2016-12-11 Bernhard Walle contributed some patches for MacOS X support. Thanks, Bernhard!

  • 2016-12-09 Fixed Perl (qdirstat-cache-writer) part of GitHub issue #39: QDirStat doesn't scan Btrfs subvolumes

    The qdirstat-cache-writer script now also checks the device names of a mount point and its parent directory, not only their major/minor device numbers; so now it will not stop at Btrfs subvolumes while scanning.

    That script uses a more simplistic approach than QDirStat itself: It invokes the df command with that path and parses its output. If the path contains very weird special characters, this may fail, in which case that directory (which at that point is already known to have a different device major/minor number than its parent) is considered a filesystem boundary, and that branch is not scanned.

  • 2016-12-08 Fixed C++ (QDirStat binary) part of GitHub issue #39: QDirStat doesn't scan Btrfs subvolumes

    This was a bit of a challenge since the relevant Btrfs commands to obtain any useful information about subvolumes all require root privileges, and I really wouldn't want to scare users off by prompting for a sudo password. QDirStat now fetches the information from /proc/mounts (or /etc/mtab if /proc/mounts is unavailable) and does some heuristics (which are not completely fool proof) to check if a potential mount point is still on the same device. That means that it will no longer treat a Btrfs subvolume as an ordinary mount point where it stops reading by default, but it just continues. On the other hand, another Btrfs mounted into the current filesystem is of course treated as a normal mount point. See also the corresponding GitHub issue for details.

    The Perl qdirstat-cache-writer still has the old behaviour, i.e. it still stops at a subvolume mount point. This will be addressed next.

  • 2016-12-07 Fixed GitHub issue #40: Crash without useful error message when no display available

    When ssh'ing without -X to a remote machine and starting QDirStat there, it would just dump core and not issue any meaningful message. The fatal error message was only in the log file:

    <ERROR> :0 (): QXcbConnection: Could not connect to display

    Now this message is also repeated on stderr, and in this particular case ("Could not connect to display"), it does not dump core anymore, but just exits with error code 1.

  • 2016-12-06 Warning to Btrfs users (Fixed as of 2012-12-09)

    If you use QDirStat to scan a Btrfs partition, any subvolumes of that partition are not scanned: Btrfs subvolumes are treated just like ordinary mount points (which, to all intents and purposes, they are). So you might wonder why the df command shows your 40 GB root filesystem as 97% full, yet QDirStat shows only about 7 GB. The rest might be hidden in subvolumes.

    QDirStat stops reading at mount points - which only makes sense because normally you want to know what eats up the disk space on that one partition that is filling up, not on any others like /home that are mounted there. Unfortunately, a Btrfs subvolume is also just another mount point, and QDirStat will stop reading there, too - at /var/log, at /var/spool, at /var/lib/libvirt etc.; a typical Btrfs root filesystem has about a dozen subvolumes, and all files in them are currently disregarded by QDirStat. You can of course click on "Continue reading at mount point" individually in QDirStat's directory tree for each one of them, but that's tedious.

    I am working on a solution. One approach would be to check if the current filesystem is Btrfs and list its subvolumes, but the Btrfs developers in their infinite wisdom decided that btrfs subvolume list <path> is a privileged operation, so QDirStat would have to use sudo with it and prompt for the root password (at which point I as a user would terminate the program and not use it anymore). This is broken by design. A simple info command like that should not require root privileges.

  • 2016-10-31 (Halloween) New stable release: V1.1-Pumpkin

    It's about time for another official release to get the accumulated fixes and small changes out into the world. Since today is Halloween, this release shall be named Pumpkin (as in the unforgettable Charlie Brown's Great Pumpkin).

    The last stable release, V1.0, was in mid-May (2016-05-16). Since then, there were 5 bug fixes and one small feature (the config file split up into independent parts so admins can provide presets to their users without overwriting the complete configuration), all described in greater detail below.

  • 2016-10-23

    • Fixed GitHub issue #32: %p does not escape single quotes properly

      If you have a file name like Don't do this.txt (with a quote character in the name), the shell used when executing a cleanup action with this would complain about unmatched single quotes.

      QDirStat had always escaped such single quotes, but not the way common shells (Bash, Zsh) expect it: They don't want a backslash in front of that embedded single quote. Rather, you need to terminate the string with a single quote, escape the embedded quote with a backslash (or put it into double quotes), and then re-open the old string with another single quote.

      Thus, 'Don't do this' becomes 'Don'\''t do this'.

      This is certainly not what most people expect. I just wonder how much other software is out there that does it the intuitive (yet wrong) way: Just escape the single quote with a backslash ('Don\'t do this').

      Of course, such file names should be avoided entirely, but you can't help some slightly broken MP3 ripper program doing it, so it needs to be handled correctly.

    • Fixed GitHub issue #31: Segfault with cleanup action while reading directories

      Now disabling cleanups that have a refresh policy other than "No Refresh" while directory reading is in progress; otherwise the re-read when the cleanup action has finished clashes with the directory read already in progress.

      This is not an optimal solution, but a very pragmatic one; the optimal solution might queue updates and execute them after the main read is done.

    • Fixed GitHub issue #33: Added command line option --slow-update (or -s) for slow remote X connections.

  • 2016-08-12

    • Fixed GitHub issue #23:

      The internal cache writer would sometimes generate incorrect cache files because of buggy URL escaping resulting in an empty file name and thus invalid cache file syntax. This affected file names with colons (which is weird, but legal).

      One of these days I'm going to throw out all that QUrl stuff and replace the few things that I need with something that actually works consistently and not just under optimum conditions.

  • 2016-08-10

    • Fixed GitHub issue #22:

      Cache files containing the root filesystem would not display correctly or segfault under certain conditions. This is now fixed.

    • Added "Refresh All" action to the main window tool bar. I had consciously avoided that because it's just too tempting to re-read the complete directory tree rather than think about what actually might have changed and then refresh just that, but it has become so common to use that action in web browsers that I found myself missing that more and more. And re-reading is not that expensive on today's mainstream PCs.

  • 2016-07-02

    • Fixed GitHub issue #21:

      When started from a desktop menu, i.e. without any command line parameters, QDirStat would not prompt for a directory to read, but read the current directory (typically the user's home directory) right away.

    • More graceful handling for nonexisting paths specified on the command line: It now no longer just throws an exception right after starting the program (which looks like a crash to the unwary user), but posts an error popup instead and then asks for a directory to read.

  • 2016-06-29

    • V1.01 (Development version)

    • Split up config file into four separate ones below ~/.config/QDirStat:

      • QDirStat.conf
      • QDirStat-cleanup.conf
      • QDirStat-exclude.conf
      • QDirStat-mime.conf

      This should make it much easier for site administrators to provide their own site-wide cleanup actions, exclude rules, or MIME categories. I did this with this in mind:

      http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/kdirstat/kdirstat-for-clusters.html

      Here, they describe how users should overwrite their KDirStat config file with one provided by the site admin so all users have those carefully crafted cleanup actions. But that also means that all other settings get lost each time there is a change in any of those commands, and users have to update that config file again.

      With the latest change, it is now possible to only replace the cleanup action config (QDirStat-cleanup.conf) and leave everything else untouched.

      Notice that this is far from a perfect solution; all cleanup actions the user added himself still get lost. But doing this perfectly might pretty quickly become an overengineered solution that would be hard to understand for everybody.

      As for migration from previous single-file configurations, QDirStat does that automatically: It reads the single file and moves the respective parts where they belong. No need to bother with any migration scripts or anything like that.

  • 2016-05-16 First stable release: V1.0

    After 3 months of Beta phase and 3 Beta releases, here is finally the official first stable release of QDirStat: Version 1.0.

    In terms of source code, there were very little changes from the last Beta (0.98-Beta3 from 2016-04-08) and no real code change (only the version number increased) from the last check-in from 2016-04-11. This version can really be considered stable in the truest sense of the word. It was not rushed out the door, and there were no hectic last minute changes. It is well tested, and the community had ample opportunity to report any problems.

  • 2016-04-11

    • buxit reported GitHub issue #16 and contributed the fix for it shortly afterwards: When clicking in the treemap, the corresponding item in the tree view was not always scrolled into the visible area. Now it is.

  • 2016-04-08

    • Beta 3

    • Fixed GitHub issue #15:

      After a cleanup action is executed that needs refreshing the affected subtree, the parent directory is selected, which is intentional so the user's focus is not thrown off completely. There was a bug when you selected an item in the treemap afterwards, that change was not correctly propagated to the internal selection model: The parent directory remained selected (which was wrong), and the newly selected item was just added to the selection, i.e. that item and (typically) its parent directory was selected. When a potentially dangerous cleanup operation was now started, it would affect not only that item, but also the directory; and, worse, that directory often went out of the visible scope of the tree view. Yes, the confirmation popup would ask for both of them, but you all know how quickly users click away those popups without really reading them. This bug is now fixed.

    • Improved the confirmation popup. Now highlighting directories much more if there is a "mixed" selection, i.e., both directories and non-directories are selected at the same time:

      New cleanup confirmation popup

  • 2016-03-20

    • Beta 2

      Beta 1 has now been out for 6 weeks, and I have not received one single bug report during that time. Maybe it's just business as usual, and people just keep waiting for others to do the testing, while they themselves are waiting for a stable release. Well, okay, so let them have their way: The current code is now officially V0.92 Beta 2. And it won't be another 6 weeks; the next versions will come a lot more quickly. Once V1.0 final is out, any bug reports will have to wait until there is time to work on them. So, folks, use those Betas wisely.

      BTW those who actually did test it will find that QDirStat is a lot more stable even in Beta 1 than other pieces of software in their official final release.

  • 2016-02-27

    • Debian / Ubuntu packaging contributed by Nathan Rennie-Waldock. He also made a PPA repository available for various Ubuntu versions - see Ubuntu packages below.

  • 2016-02-06

    • Added tab for exclude rules configuration to the config dialog (see screenshot above). That's it: That was the last missing major feature.

      I hereby declare QDirStat to be Beta.

      Please use the GitHub issue tracker for any bug reports.

    • Exclude rules can now optionally match against the full path again. I had changed this for just the directory name without the path by default, which makes regexps a lot simpler. You can now select the old behaviour, too, if you wish. This is configurable in the exclude rules tab of the config dialog.

    • Made the config file format of the new view header columns human readable and editable. The first version from yesterday used the native format of Qt's QHeaderView -- a QByteArray in hex encoding. This was a sorry excuse for a settings format - not usable for anybody, not legible, much less editable. Trolls, WTF? Pretty and usable formats everywhere else, and a glorified (well, not even glorified) hexdump here?

      I hope some admins who might want to provide ready-made config files for their users will appreciate that. If not, this is just for consistency's sake; I want to be able to read and edit my config file as I like, even without any graphical config dialogs.

    • The tree view now uses "middle eliding" for texts that don't fit into a column. It used to elide at the end of the text, but that's not necessarily useful for long file names; they often differ only at the end with lots of text at the start in common. So, now it's no longer "VeryLongTextBlurb...", but "VeryLongTe...foo.o" if anything needs to be cut off. Of course, this makes most sense with the new column width modes, otherwise your column will simply be resized wide enough to fit everything in.

  • 2016-02-05

  • 2016-02-02

    • Fixed a bug where directory names with a colon ":" were cut off when reading a cache file, thus all files and directories below that point could not find their parent directory, so that complete branch was cut off.

    • Much improved performance for treemaps of large directory trees: Now not rebuilding the treemap immediately when the user resizes the window or drags the splitter dividing the main window, but just scheduling an update in 200 milliseconds. If another rebuild is requested during this time, the previous one is discarded. The net effect is that the treemap now is rebuilt only once, not for every pixel size change of the treemap subwindow, so the application remains responsive during dragging the splitter or resizing the main window.

  • 2016-02-01

  • 2016-01-30

    • Added a context menu for the tree view header. It's still very limited, but you can now turn off auto-resizing of the tree columns for the current session.

    • Added a .desktop file so QDirStat should now show up in the menu of the major desktop environments (KDE, GNOME, Xfce, Unity, ...) and in their file managers' "Open With" menus when you right-click a directory.

  • 2016-01-29

    • Since the missing tabs in the config dialog will also have a list of things at the left and details of the one current item of those things at the right, I tried to move out the common part of this as a base class. Since the things those config tabs manage have different types, I tried a C++ template class. But it turns out that in this year 2016 Qt's moc still does not support templates. WTF?!

    • 21:00 (Grrrr) Okay, I found a workaround, albeit a pretty ugly one: Work with void pointers and forced type casts. Yuck. That's being bombed back to the early 1990s - we had to do this kind of stuff back with OSF/Motif in plain C all the time. Type safety was unknown back then; you could get all kinds of nasty surprises by casting pointers slightly wrong, and the compiler had no chance (even if it hadn't been that crappy SunOS C compiler, but a decent GCC) to catch any of this.

      25 years later, and we are still stuck with that kind of stone age programming - just because some tool never got ported to the 21st century. Sigh.

      Yet another day of development completely wasted due to insufficiencies of underlying tools. Just great. I am getting fed up with this.

  • 2016-01-22

    • Improved usability of refreshing the tree after cleanup actions: They used to leave the tree behind with nothing selected, the branch the user just worked in closed (which is natural since it needed to be re-read from disk) and scrolled to another position - maximum disorientation for the user. Now the parent directory is selected, giving at least some hint where the action took place. It's not optimal yet, but much better than before.

    • Improved usability of the tree widget: When an item in the treemap is selected, all other branches in the tree are now collapsed before the new branch is opened. But this required working around some design flaws in the underlying QTreeView class.

      Rant: Trolls, didn't it ever occur to you that if you are constantly using that d->expandedIndexes from QTreeViewPrivate in the QTreeView public class, derived widgets might need that information, too? There is no way to access the currently expanded items other than cheating in some creative way. Seriously, I am not going to duplicate that bookkeeping with the expanded() and collapsed() signals, always being off by some items or not getting the information that items were removed (or listen to half a dozen more signals for even more advanced bookkeeping). If a widget class cannot provide that kind of elementary information to its derived classes, it's poorly designed. Period.

  • 2016-01-18

    • Applied Qt4 compatibility patches from Michael Matz. The only nontrivial issue was a thin wrapper around QProcess to make it store the program to execute and its arguments in the constructor and use those later with a plain start() without any more arguments.

  • 2016-01-16

    • The MIME categories and the corresponding treemap colors can now be configured - see screenshot above. Yes, this is a real treemap widget as a preview for the colors, complete with a demo directory tree with a random number of files with random sizes (i.e. it looks different for each invocation). That part was the last major feature that was missing; now it's only little stuff that's left (still quite a number of it, though).

    • Treemap colors are now no longer fixed; there is now a rules engine called MimeCategorizer. It uses a new class MimeCategory that groups MIME types (by filename, not by magic numbers in the file) into broad categories like "Documents", "Videos", "Music", "Images". Each of these categories has a list of filename extensions that belong to it (".mp4", ".wmv", ".mov" etc. for "Videos", for example). The categorizer uses a very fast lookup map for the vast majority of the rules (simple file extensions), but it can also use more powerful wildcards wherever you like them.

    • The log file is now created per user: It's now /tmp/qdirstat-$UID.log, which for most Linux home users (with only one user account on the machine) is typically /tmp/qdirstat-1000.log .

  • 2016-01-15

    • Added new macros for use within cleanups: %terminal and %filemanager. They are expanded to the terminal window or file manager application, respectively, of the current desktop (KDE, GNOME, Xfce, ...). I just wasted four hours (that could have been put to better use adding missing features - grrrr) because KDE's konsole misbehaves in every way possible (leading today's WTF count with 3):

      • It won't let me start it in the background from within QDirStat; it simply exits. I tried all kinds of command line arguments (--nofork, --hold), I tried to wrap it into a subshell, into the nohup command - nothing helped. WTF?

      • It exits when QDirStat exits. Well, since it won't let me start it in the background, that's not too surprising. Still, if it does its own fork(), WTF?

      • It doesn't give a damn about the current directory you start it from, it needs its --workdir command line argument. WTF?

    • Added %d macro for cleanups: This is the directory name with full path. For directories, this is the same as %p. For files, this is their parent directory's %p.

    • %terminal : Terminal window application of the current desktop; one of

      • konsole
      • gnome-terminal
      • xfce4-terminal
      • lxterminal
      • eterm
      • xterm (fallback)

    • %filemanager : File manager application of the current desktop; one of

      • konqueror
      • nautilus
      • thunar
      • pcmanfm
      • xdg-open (fallback)

    • Which desktop is used is determined by the $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP environment variable. Currently supported:

      • KDE
      • GNOME
      • Unity
      • Xfce
      • Lxde
      • Enlightenment (no clue how to start its file manager, though - using xdg-open here)

    • Users can override this with the $QDIRSTAT_DESKTOP environment variable, so you can get, say, the Xfce terminal or file manager despite currently running KDE if you set

      export QDIRSTAT_DESKTOP="Xfce"

    • Of course, you can still simply use your favourite file manager if you simply use its command instead of %filemanager in the default "Open File Manager Here" cleanup action.

    • Added new standard cleanup actions:

      • Git clean. Start "git clean -dfx" in the current item's directory. This is relevant for developers or for people who regularly build software from Git repositories.

      • Clear directory contents. This removes everything inside a directory, but leaves the directory itself intact. ~/.thumbnails or browser cache directories are typical candidates for this with their ever-growing content: You probably want to keep the directory, but get rid of everything inside it.

    • Redefined the semantics of the file manager cleanup action: It no longer tries to open files with the corresponding application depending on MIME type, it now always opens a file manager in that directory (which can open the file in its app if you want that). It's now also renamed to "open file manager here". If you still want the old behaviour, you can easily add your own cleanup action with the "xdg-open %p" command.

    • Added "Troubleshooting" section in this document.

    • Cleanup actions that have an icon are now added to the tool bar. Right now, only some of the predefined actions have an icon. There is currently no way for the user to specify an icon for a cleanup action.

  • 2016-01-13 Added "move to trash", this time as a normal action in the "Edit" menu, the toolbar and the context menus. This is a real implementation of the XDG Trash specification. It does not rely on outside tools that might or might not be available.

  • 2016-01-12 We have a first MacOS X port! Sonja Krause-Harder volunteered to install a Qt development environment (11 GB! Yikes!) on her MacBook. I would have expected some changes, but a simple "qmake; make" just did the job. Amazing! -- The major challenge was to find where "qmake" gets installed in that MacOS Qt environment.

  • 2016-01-10 Went through the old KDirStat changelog and found a few bugs that I had fixed there -- and promptly repeated with the new QDirStat:

    • Disable cleanups while reading directories. This would result in a segfault.

    • No longer showing the path of the current directory being read. This sped up reading /usr on my machine from 9.5 sec to 1.5 sec (!).

  • 2016-01-09 Cleaned up this README.md file. It had grown much too long.

  • 2016-01-08 Cleanups are now configurable - see screenshot.

    • Cleanup actions can now be added, deleted, and moved up or down the list. There is no longer a hard limit to the number of cleanup actions; create as many as you like. Of course, your screen size is still the limit for those menus. ;-)

    • In addition to the old cleanup parameters, you can now configure the output window behaviour. The default is "show after timeout" with a timeout of half a second. This may sound pretty short, but I started with 3 seconds and found that it felt sluggish. A modern PC can get a lot of things done in half a second; yet waiting for more than that feels like an eternity. So if any action takes longer than that, an output window pops up. Of course, if there is any error, it pops up anyway.

    • You can now configure the shell to use. I was weighing the pros and cons of always using either /bin/sh or the user's login shell, and I found that there is no killer argument in favour or against either option. For example, I use the zsh, and while it's a great interactive shell, it did give me problems for that "remove junk files" cleanup: "rm -f *.o *.bak *~" -- when any of the wildcards cannot be expanded because there is no such file, it complains. Okay, you can wrap the whole command in "/bin/bash -c", but that's yet another indirection, so now you can configure /bin/bash for that particular cleanup action. On the other hand, for some things I might want my original shell environment, so I do want my login shell by default. This is now the default behaviour: Try $SHELL (the user's login shell), and if that environment variable is not set or whatever is set there is not executable, it falls back to /bin/bash and then /bin/sh. And you can still enter your own in an editable combo box (but not "ruby" or "perl" because the "-c" option is still added automatically).

  • 2016-01-05 I admit I had never really liked the way the output of cleanup actions was typically hidden. Most of the times I couldn't care less, but sometimes there were error messages that mostly went unnoticed - such as no permissions to convert a directory into a compressed tarball. Now we have something new: A process watcher window that looks very much like a terminal window. The commands and their output are displayed there: Normal output (stdout) in amber, error output (stderr) in red. It will be configurable for each individual cleanup action if this window is desired: You can choose to always open it, to not open it at all -- or to have it automatically open when there is any output on stderr. And there is also a checkbox to automatically close it when the cleanup process finishes successfully. This is all not 100% perfect yet, but it works quite well already.

  • 2016-01-04 Cleanups are back. They still need some work, and you'll have to edit the config file in ~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf to configure anything, but they work.

  • 2016-01-03 We are getting nearer to the target:

    • Settings are read from and written to the settings file in all relevant places. This includes what columns to display and their order. See section 'Settings' below.

    • Refreshing the selected tree branch, continuing reading at mount points and at excluded directories now works.

    • Context menus are back. I am somewhat proud of the way my new ActionManager handles that with Qt introspection to avoid duplicating stuff: I wanted to keep the QActions in the Qt Designer file. That ActionManager keeps a pointer to the MainWindow that is the parent of all those QActions, and attached views can search that widget tree for action names (yes, that works only if you keep those QObject names tidy - which I am doing anyway).

    • Found some more icons for those actions.

    • Exclude rules are now greatly simplified. They no longer get the entire path to match which requires quite complex regexps, they only get the last path component - i.e., no longer "/work/home/sh/src/qdirstat/src/.git", but only ".git". You can now even tell the exclude rule to use a simplfied syntax: "FixedString" or "Wildcard" in addition to the normal "RegExp".

    • Still missing (this list is getting considerably shorter):

      • Cleanups
      • Settings dialog

  • 2016-01-01 New Year release

    • Added mouse operations to the treemap. Some where there in the old kdirstat (but I guess not many users knew about them), some are new:

      • Left click: Select item and make it the current item.
      • Ctrl+Left click: Add item to selection or toggle selection.
      • Middle click: Select the current item's parent. Cycle back at toplevel.
      • Double click left: Zoom treemap in.
      • Double click middle: Zoom treemap out.
      • Mouse wheel: Zoom treemap in or out.

    • Reliably sort by pending read jobs while reading.

    • Fixed crashes if wildly clicking in the tree while reading. Yes, I know... "Doctor, it hurts when I do that!" - "Then don't do that."

  • 2015-12-31 New Year's Eve release

    • Added the URL of the current item in the status bar at the bottom of the main window. If more than one item is selected, it displays the total sum of all selected items there.

    • Treemap zoom in / out / zoom reset works. The treemap now automatically zooms out if an item outside its current scope is clicked in the tree view.

    • Added more menu and toolbar actions and icons for many of them.

    • The treemap's red "current item" rectangle is now stippled instead of a solid line if the current item is not also selected (users can do that with ctrl-click).

    • Added "about" dialogs for the program and the used Qt version.

  • 2015-12-30 Treemap rendering now works as expected, and selecting items (including multi-selection with shift-click and ctrl-click in the tree view and ctrl-click in the treemap view) works. It was a bit of a challenge to avoid Qt signal ping-pong between the selection model object and the two views.

  • 2015-12-28 Treemaps are back. It's not perfect yet, but the basic rendering works. I admit I was somewhat scared of that part, but the transition from Qt3 QCanvas to QGraphicsScene / QGraphicsView went much smoother than I had expected. I am very glad I don't have to dig deep into the math again with those cushioned treemaps; that part worked completely unchanged. :-)

  • 2015-12-27 The tree view now supports extended selection, i.e. you can shift-click to select a range of items or ctrl-click to select or deselect individual items. This was the most requested feature for the last KDirStat. This means you can now select more than one item at once to move it to the trash can etc. (once cleanup actions are back).

  • 2015-12-25 Christmas release

    • Sorting is now done internally in the DirTreeModel, and it's blazingly fast. It uses lazy sorting - postponing sorting until the last possible moment for each tree branch. Maybe the branch will never get visible, and then it doesn't need to be sorted at all. The QSortProxyModel is gone.

    • Reading cache files finally works again. It was quite some hassle to find all the places where the invisible root item that is required for the QTreeView / QAbstractItemModel make a difference. I hope now I caught all of them.

    • Fixed some bugs that resulted in segfaults. Well, it's a development version. Such things happen.

    • Removed the section about K4DirStat in this README.md; that information was outdated. It turns out I hadn't looked at the most recent sources of K4DirStat - that was entirely my own stupidity. My apologies. Since right now I don't have an informed opinion about K4DirStat, I preferred to remove that section entirely for the time being. Looks like K4DirStat is indeed ported to Qt5 now.

  • 2015-12-20 First usable preview version - see screenshot above. It's still pretty rough, and sorting via the QSortProxyModel seems to be awfully slow once a number of tree branches were ever opened. Looks like I'll have to do that myself, too.

  • 2015-12-18 Found the crippling bugs that made the DirTreeModel do crazy things. None of the Qt classes proved to be helpful to find that - they just happily do the crazy things. That's what I call poor design. Now there is a first working QDirStat with a useful display tree, including icons (but no percentage bar graph yet).

  • 2015-12-07 First working DirTreeModel -- still minimalistic, but working.

  • 2015-12-06 Created tree model based on QAbstractItemModel. Compiles, but dumps core so far.

  • 2015-12-05 Imported and ported directory tree data classes. Hammered through the compiler, but nothing usable so far.

  • 2015-11-28 QDirStat project is being set up. Nothing usable so far.

KDirStat

KDirStat is the predecessor to QDirStat. QDirStat is an 80% rewrite of the KDE3 based KDirStat.

KDirStat home page: http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/

Sources: https://github.com/shundhammer/kdirstat

KDirStat History

(Incomplete list, just highlighting important releases)

  • 2006-06-01 KDirStat 2.5.3: The last KDE3 based version.

  • 2006-01-08 KDirStat 2.5.2:

    • New: Read and write cache files

  • 2005-02-22 KDirStat 2.4.4

    • New: Handle hard links and sparse files

  • 2003-01-30 KDirStat 2.3.5

    • New: colored treemap

  • 2003-01-05 KDirStat 2.3.3

    • New: Treemaps (monochrome only)

    • Communication between treemap and tree list view: Select an item in one view, and it is automatically selected in the other one, too.

  • 2002-02-25 KDirStat 2.0.0

    • Complete rewrite for KDE 2 / Qt 2

    • Doing internal caching and (very) lazy creating of QListViewItems for improved performance and resource consumption

  • 2000-01-21 KDirStat 0.86 for KDE 1 announced -- the first public version.