rdirstat

A fast disk usage analyzer in the WinDirStat / KDirStat / ncdu family — written in Rust, ships as both a terminal UI and a native desktop GUI from the same scanner core.

Why

I wanted a disk-usage tool that's actually fast. Existing options either took forever on large trees or had visible UI lag while scanning. rdirstat walks the filesystem in parallel via the ignore crate, keeps a live shared state, and snapshots it at 100 ms intervals so the UI stays responsive even mid-scan.

I also wanted both a TUI (for SSH sessions and dotfile-machines) and a native desktop GUI, without maintaining two scanners. rdirstat ships both — they share the exact same engine and snapshot pipeline; only the rendering layer differs.

Screenshots

GUI	TUI

Both frontends share an Explorer view (entry list with size bars) and an Overview view (totals + biggest files / dirs / extensions).

Install

Pre-built binaries

GitHub Releases ships:

• Linux: .tar.gz, .deb, and .rpm for both x86_64 and aarch64.
• macOS: .tar.gz for x86_64-apple-darwin and aarch64-apple-darwin.
• Windows: .exe Inno Setup installer for x86_64.

# Fedora / RHEL / Alma / Rocky / openSUSE
sudo rpm -i rdirstat-<ver>-1.x86_64.rpm rdirstat-gui-<ver>-1.x86_64.rpm

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo dpkg -i rdirstat_<ver>_amd64.deb rdirstat-gui_<ver>_amd64.deb

Releases live at https://github.com/AndyGybels/rdirstat/releases.

From source

Requires Rust ≥ 1.78 (2021 edition).

git clone https://github.com/AndyGybels/rdirstat.git
cd rdirstat
cargo install --path rdirstat       # TUI
cargo install --path rdirstat-gui   # GUI

On Linux the GUI build also needs the usual desktop dev libs:

sudo apt-get install -y \
  libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev \
  libxkbcommon-dev libgtk-3-dev libatk1.0-dev

Usage

rdirstat                # TUI in current directory
rdirstat /              # TUI scanning the whole disk
rdirstat-gui            # GUI in current directory
rdirstat-gui ~/Projects # GUI scanning a path

TUI keybindings

GUI

The GUI exposes the same functionality through both keyboard shortcuts (same keys as the TUI) and a toolbar. It runs egui via eframe and starts in manual scan mode — press r or click Scan (r) to begin.

Architecture

rdirstat-core  ─── scanning engine + shared state + UI snapshots
   │                  │
   │                  ├── scan.rs      parallel walker, allocated-size
   │                  │                accounting, inode dedup, real
   │                  │                post-order completion
   │                  ├── snapshot.rs  100 ms snapshot pump for the UIs
   │                  ├── app.rs       directory navigation + history
   │                  └── mounts.rs    drive picker
   │
   ├── rdirstat       (TUI)  ratatui + crossterm
   └── rdirstat-gui   (GUI)  eframe + egui (wgpu/Metal/Vulkan/DX12)

Both frontends consume the same UiSnapshot data structure; neither reads the live ScanState directly. This keeps the rendering paths simple and means the engine can be reused — e.g. for a future web frontend or a non-interactive --summary mode.

Packaging

CI (.github/workflows/release.yml) is triggered by v* tags and builds:

• platform binaries for Windows / Linux × {x86_64, aarch64} / macOS × {Intel, Apple Silicon}
• .deb for both Linux architectures (via cargo-deb)
• .rpm for both Linux architectures (via cargo-generate-rpm)
• a Windows installer (Inno Setup)

All artifacts attach to the GitHub Release automatically.

License

MIT — see the SPDX expression in each crate's Cargo.toml.

Contributions welcome. The codebase's most opinionated invariants (allocated-size accounting, inode dedup, post-order completion) are exercised by cargo test -p rdirstat-core; please keep them green.