Leaves
A text-UI disk usage treemap visualizer
Details
- External ID
- 48936389
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Leaves
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- July 16, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 93
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9044205495818399
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
GUI disk analyzers are great for figuring out what's filling up your laptop/desktop drive.On containers or remote servers, the options are limited to purely text based utilities (e.g. du) or list-centric TUIs (e.g. ncdu) which are usually limited to viewing one directory at a time.I created leaves to fill that gap.Inspired by classic utilities like WinDirStat and KDirStat, it uses a 2-dimensional treemap^1 visualization to show the entire directory hierarchy with proportionally sized rectangles.It's performant enough to handle millions of files, thanks to Rust and multi-threading. However, block characters aren't as suited as pixels for resolving a large number of items. Leaves can show file-type summaries per directory or partition the top-level directories by extension, allowing you to see not only where space is being used, but also how.For instance, I can see the largest chunk of my home directory is taken up by uv caches for python and old Linux ISOs that I could easily re-download if needed. Or in a particular container, +600MB is used by standard Rust documentation and tutorials, and that it is the only location with HTML/JS files, when only the libraries and build tools are needed (note to self: remember to use the minimal profile next time).^1: https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/doc/Tree...
Enrichment
- Theme
- system maintenance and file utilities
- Vertical
- —
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- text ui disk usage treemap visualizer
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a terminal user interface (TUI) tool using standard filesystem walking and squarified treemap algorithms implemented with well-documented TUI libraries.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ncdu, WinDirStat, GrandPerspective, WizTree, Sequoia View
Concerns raised: WizTree no longer free for commercial use, Performance comparison unclear vs other GUI tools, Memory usage analysis is complex and ill-defined
Feature requests: Export results as HTML+SVG reports, Persistence using embedded database for resummarization, Real-time updates from file notifications, Support reading from data files (like ncdu format)
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 139 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #16 of 140 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 255 days after the earliest competitor.
- SpaceSharp · github · 2026-09-24 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- disktree · github · 2026-09-24 · 1784 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- DiskScope: disk space analyzer · ph · 2026-09-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Treemapolis · github · 2026-09-14 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- GrandPerspective-style treemaps for the web and disk usage visualizer · hn · 2026-04-29 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- diskard · hn · 2026-03-06 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- SpaceSharp · ph · 2026-09-26 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- SpaceScope · ph · 2026-09-24 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.44
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.