Leaves
A text-UI disk usage treemap visualizer
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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...
HN · launched Jul 16, 2026 · 93 upvotes (top 10%) · 0 views
Niche: disk space cleanup utilities · 196 launches, 13 in the last 7 days ▼ -19% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Analytics & BI
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 196 launches in disk space cleanup utilities →
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 : 350 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #38 of 351 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 255 days after the earliest competitor.
- SquirrelDisk 2.0 · ph · 2026-10-02 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- spacemapper · github · 2026-10-21 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.61
- SpaceSharp · github · 2026-09-24 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- SpaceMap · ph · 2026-10-24 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Diskscape · ph · 2026-10-06 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- 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
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