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Qt-based directory statistics: KDirStat without any KDE -- from the author ofthe original KDirStat.

(c) 2015-2025 Stefan HundhammerStefan.Hundhammer@gmx.de

Target Platforms: Linux, BSD, Unix-like systems; macOS

License: GPL V2

Updated: 2026-01-18

Main window screenshot: Tree view (upper half), treemap (below), details panel (right).

Notice the multi-selection in the tree and the treemap.

QDirStat is a graphical application to show where your disk space has gone andto help you to clean it up.

It shows the total size of directories and of their files both in a traditionaltree view and in a coloredtreemap graphics where a largefile is shown as a large rectangle, and small files are shown as smallrectangles. Click on it, and you will see where in the tree the file is, andyou can instantly move it to the trash if you like. The color corresponds tothe file type: Images, videos or whatever.

This is a Qt-only port of the old Qt3/KDE3-based KDirStat, now based on thelatest Qt6. It does not need any KDE libs or infrastructure. It runs on everyX11-based desktop on Linux, BSD and other Unix-like systems, and in a Dockercontainer.

QDirStat has a number of new features compared to KDirStat. To name a few:

• Multi-selection in both the tree and the treemap.

• Unlimited number of user-defined cleanup actions.

• Properly show errors of cleanup actions (and their output, if desired).

• Configurable file categories (MIME types), treemap colors, exclude rules,tree columns.

• Package manager support:

  • Show what software package a system file belongs to.
  • Packages view showing disk usage of installed softwarepackages and their individual files.
  • Unpackaged files view showing what files in systemdirectories do not belong to any installed software package.

• New views:

  • Disk usage per file type (by filename extension).
  • File size histogram view.
  • File Age View
  • Free, used and reserved disk size for each mounted filesystem (likedf)

See sectionNew Features for more details.

1. Screenshot
2. Latest Stable Release
3. Latest News
4. History
5. Related Software: KDirStat, WinDirStat, K4DirStat and more
6. Motivation / Rant: Why?
7. Features
8. macOS Compatibility
9. Windows Compatibility
10. Ready-made Packages
11. QDirStat Docker Containers
12. Building
13. Contributing
14. Troubleshooting
15. Further Reading
16. Packaging Status
17. Donate

Full-size images and descriptions on theScreenshots Page

QDirStat is Free Open Source Software.

If you find it useful, please consider donating.You can donate any amount of your choice via PayPal:

QDirStat V2.0

See therelease announcement.

Download installable binary packages for various Linux distributions here:Ready-made packages

• 2026-01-18New stable release: 2.0

  Summary:

  • Migration to Qt6

  • Added infrastructure for program translations in case somebody volunteersto create a (separate!) GitHub project and package "qdirstat-lang" fortranslations.

  • You can now select the ISO date and time format: "2024-12-28 17:38" insteadof the current locale settings. There is now a checkbox in the "General"tab for that.

    There is now no more need to endure insane date / time formats like"Dec 28, 2025 5:38 PM" just because you set your locale environment to English.

• 2025-12-26

  • Port to Qt6

    Yes, this took quite a while. But now QDirStat is ported to Qt6.There was quite some discussion here inissue #280about it.

    While the overall end user benefit may really be underwhelming, it makesQDirStat future proof; Qt5 is being phased out in many Linux distributions,and Qt6 has already advanced to version 6.10.

  • Translations

    Added infrastructure for program translations: Atranslator class basedonQTranslator and usingGNU gettext, imported from theMyrlyn project,and amakepot script to generate .pot files as a base fortranslations.

    Notice that translations will not be hosted in the QDirStat sourcerepository, so source code and translations will be kept separate.

    The intention is that a translations maintainer will create a separatetranslations project and repoqdirstat-lang and manage the contributionsof community translators for different languages withGNU gettext toolsand a web translations tool likeweblate.

  • UpcomingQDirStat 2.0 release:

    Those who can and who are willing please build QDirStat from Git master andtest it thoroughly. Right now it shows a version1.95+, but there is noGit tag to avoid misleading users into believing that it's a stableversion. That would be premature; it still needs some testing.

• 2025-04-16

  • Article about QDirStat onopenSUSE News about package manager integration and system introspection.

• 2025-03-17

  • Somebody got creative to use QDirStat for a whole different thing:Visualizing ELF binaries via QDirStat cache files withelf_mem_map.

• 2024-09-28

  • You can now select the ISO date and time format: "2024-12-28 17:38" insteadof the current locale settings. There is now a checkbox in the "General"tab for that.

    Every time I have to endure that insane US date and time format, I tend toscream at my screen: "Dec 28, 2024 5:38 PM"?Really? And that's thedefault (especially for theroot account) unless you configured all thoselocale settings manually; for both your own user account and forroot,because you need to run QDirStat asroot to get access to systemdirectories with restrictive permissions.

    From now on, simply use "Edit" -> "Configure QDirStat" -> tab "General"and check "Use ISO date and time".

    And yes, I know that the original ISO date and time format is"2024-12-28T17:38" which also does not pass the sanity test. A capital "T"as the delimiter? Really? What were they thinking? Easy to parse, butreally hard to read. Whoever designed this did it for lazy scripting, notfor humans.

• 2024-04-25

  • Added a new article onQDirStat Font Size.

• 2024-03-01

  • Extended the cache file format to also include UID, GID and permissions,and also improved the formatting to make it better human readable.

    See alsoGitHub issue #265.

    This new cache file format 2.0 is now the default, but the Perlqdirstat-cache-writer still supports writing the old format without thosenew fields to make the cache files a bit smaller: Use the-1 command lineoption.

    Cache files in the old format 1.0 can still be read, of course.

• 2024-02-13

  • New: macOS binaries for QDirStat

    Jesus Herrera Arroyochuy.max@gmail.comcontacted me to ask for my approval to provide binaries of QDirStat formacOS. I answered:

    Sure, go ahead! But since I have no clue about macOS X, I'll have toredirect any users having macOS-specific problems to your repo's issuetracker.

    So here is his new GitHub repo for those binaries:

    https://github.com/jesusha123/qdirstat-macos

    Go toReleases at the right side panel.

    Also expect them on Homebrew (work in progress).

    I welcome this very much; there have been some tech-savvy users who builttheir own QDirStat for macOS since the project started in late 2015, butthey were always very few, and it's not something for a casual user to dothat. The situation should greatly improve with pre-built platform binariesfor macOS, making QDirStat much more approachable on that platform.

    As usual with all binary distributions, caveats apply: You need to havetrust in the distributor; no matter if it's a Linux distribution like SUSE,Ubuntu, Fedora / Red Hat or all the others out there, or an enthusiasticindividual like Jesus Herrera. I am optimistic that he deserves that trust.

    If you don't have that trust, by all means go ahead and build it yourselffrom the sources, even if that is considerably more work, and it needs sometechnical expertise about how to build software in general, and about thetarget platform (macOS in this case) in particular.

• 2024-01-15

  • Just one day after the stable release, pull requests for missing includefiles keep trickling in.

    Some time ago, I cleaned up includes, throwing out the ones that I was surewere unneeded; of course recompiling after every step. They were allunneeded on Linux with GCC, but it turns out that at least some of themwere indeed needed on other platforms. Probably recursive includes aredifferent on those platforms.

    I am collecting all those pull requests and merging (cherry-picking) themto thestable-1.9 branch. So if V1.9 does not build on your platform withthe official release tagged1.9, please use thatstable-1.9 branch. Ifthat still doesn't help - more pull requests are welcome.

    Sorry for the inconvenience.

• 2024-01-14New 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 therelease announcement.

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

  TL;DR:

  • It's big and fat (113 MB)
  • It's a very outdated version: QDirStat 1.6.1 from February 2020
  • 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

SeeDevHistory.mdfor older entries.

This is just a rough summary. For more details, seeDevHistory.md.

• 2024-01-14 New stable release: 1.9

  • 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

• 2022-06-30 New stable release: 1.8.1

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

  • Some small improvements

  • Bug fixes

• 2021-08-28 New stable release: 1.8

  • New view:File Age Statistics

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

  • Bug fixes

  • Some small improvements

• 2021-04-05 New stable release: 1.7.1

  • 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, aBroken Link warning is also shown.

  • Menu reorganization. The new toplevel menus are now:

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

• 2020-07-26 New stable release: 1.7

  • Closing the gap between sizes reported by QDirstat and sizes reported bythedu 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 thedf command(but without the cruft).

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

• 2020-02-13 New stable release: 1.6.1

  • 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

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

• 2019-07-22 New stable release: V1.6

  • Newpackages view

  • Newunpackaged files view

  • Performance improvements while reading directories

  • Vast Performance improvement for huge directories(100.000+ entries in a single directory)

• 2018-11-07 New stable release: V1.5

  • Newdetails panel

  • Package manager support to show what software package a file belongs to

  • Newbreadcrumbs navigation

  • Switchable tree layouts L1 / L2 / L3

• 2017-06-04 New stable release: V1.4

  • Newfile size statistics with histogram

  • Shading for empty space in the treemap for lots of very small files

• 2017-03-05 New stable release: V1.3

  • Newfile type view

  • Locate files of a certain type (filename extension) in the tree

• 2017-01-03 New stable release: V1.2

  • Improved Btrfs subvolumes support

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

  • Bug fixes

  • Split up the config file into several ones

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

• 2016-04-08 Beta 3 release

• 2016-03-20 Beta 2 release

• 2016-02-06 Beta 1 release

• 2015-11-28 QDirStat project start: Ported from the old KDE 3 KDirStat

• Predecessor: KDE 3KDirStat

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

  • 2003: Bernhard Seifert wroteWinDirStat based on the KDirStat idea ofcoupling a tree view and a treemap and providing cleanup actions.

  • 2003-01-05 KDirStat 2.3.3: Treemaps

  • 2002-02-25 KDirStat 2.0.0: Complete rewrite for KDE 2 / Qt 2

  • 2000-01-21 KDirStat 0.86 for KDE 1 announced: First public version.

KDirStat was the first program of this kind (combining a traditional tree viewwith atreemap), also written by the same author asQDirStat. It was made for KDE 1 back in early 2000; later ported to KDE 2, thenKDE 3.

QDirStat is based on that code, but made independent of any KDE libraries orinfrastructure, so it has much fewer library and package dependencies;basically only the Qt 6 libs and libz, both of which most Linux / BSD machineshave installed anyway if there is any graphical desktop installed.

There are lots of articles and user forum comments about QDirStat being a "niceLinux port of WinDirStat". Well, nothing could be further from the truth:WinDirStat is a Windows port of KDirStat, the predecessor of QDirStat.

So it's the other way round:The Linux version was there first, andsomebody liked it so much that he wrote a Windows version based on thatidea. That's a rare thing; usually people port Windows originals to Linux.

See alsohttps://windirstat.net/background.html and the WinDirStat "About"dialog.

K4DirStat is a port to KDE 4 / Qt 4 of the old KDE 3 / Qt 3 KDirStat. QDirStat isindependent of that; it is based on the old KDE 3 KDirStat directly.

• Baobab
• Filelight
• ncdu
• du

SeeDisk Usage Tools Compared:QDirStat vs. K4DirStat vs. Baobab vs. Filelight vs. ncdu (including benchmarks)in the Wiki.

After having used KDE since its early days (since about 1998), I didn't likethe direction anymore that KDE has been taking. I loved KDE 1, KDE 2, KDE3. When KDE 4 came along, it took me a long time to try to adopt it, and when Idid, I moved back to KDE 3 after a short while, then tried again with the nextrelease, moved back again -- several times.

I really tried to like it, but whenever I thought I tamed it to meet myrequirements, a new version came along that introduced yet another annoyance.

To name a few:

• A lot of things that used to be user configurable in KDE 3 are notconfigurable anymore, and when you approach the KDE 4/5 developers aboutthat, they will tell you that this is intentional, and they do not intend tobring those config options back. Well, thanks a lot; this is the Appleapproach where they think they know what is good for you, and you are justtoo stupid.

• Konqueror as the old central tool is as good as dead. It's still there as analternate file manager (for those who find it), but the primary one is thedumbed-down Dolphin that I consider unusable: It's only useful for completenewbies, not for power users. The web browser part of Konqueror is sooutdated that you can't do much with it with most modern web sites, so thegreat integration of web and local file manager that was the major strongpoint of Konqueror (and thus KDE) no longer exists.

• I don't like the fact that I can't simply put icons on my desktop anymore --no, I have to create a plasmoid first as a container, and those things keepdoing weird stuff that drives every user crazy. With one false move of yourmouse, it might be gone, change shape, move to another place or whatever.

• I also don't like the desktop search that eats resources like there is notomorrow (disk space, disk I/O, CPU usage) and that for all practicalpurposes you can't get rid of.

• I don't like the fact that the mail client relies on that MySQL basedframework calledAkonadi that is not only resource-hungry, but also sofragile that I had to use theakonadiconsole lots of times just to bring itback to life. Seriously, if I as a Linux system developer have a hard timedoing that, what is a normal user expected to do?

• Activities vs. multiple desktops. I tried to use both, but they don'tintegrate well. The desktops previewer is far inferior to the old one fromKDE3: Only monochrome rectangles, no real preview. The activities plasmoidkeeps rearranging my carefully placed and named activities at random. WTF?!

• Everything is so fragmented that not even the naming is clear anymore. Whatused to be KDE is now a jumble of the KF Framework, the KF libs, the KF appsand the Plasma desktop. Yeah, great job, folks; people used to know what KDEstood for. Nobody knows what the hell all those components are, and neitherdoes anybody care anymore. You paved your way to oblivion with buzzwords.Great marketing strategy for gaining more visibility!

Then the next generation KDE arrived,Plasma 5. When I was force-migrated toit at work with theSUSE Tumbleweed rolling release, the experience was sobad that I moved to theXfce Desktop.

Now every time I started my own KDirStat, it started about a dozen KDEprocesses along with it -- processes that it needs only for minor things likeloading icons or translations. I really don't need or want that.

So it was time to make KDirStat self-sufficient; it never used that much of allthe KDE infrastructure anyway. Time to make a pure Qt-based and self-sufficientQDirStat.

And while I was at it, I took the chance to add some features that I had wantedfor a long time, yet I had never gotten myself to start working on:

• Multi-selection in the directory tree so you can delete several files atonce.

• Remove limitations like having only a fixed number of user-defined cleanupactions.

• Properly show the output of cleanup actions, in particular when they reportederrors.

• Make treemap colors configurable: Use custom colors and match them touser-defined filename extensions.

• Move away from the arcane KDE build system: Back with KDE 1/2/3 it was theAutotools with custom KDE extensions that only a handful people in theworld really understood (I was not among them), laterCMake which is littlebetter, just differently confusing.

Yes, there is a Qt4 / Qt5 port of KDirStat called K4DirStat. K4DirStat is anindependent project that started when I had not worked on the old KDirStat fora long time (my last KDirStat release had been in mid-2006).

QDirStat is based on that same code from the 2006 KDirStat. It's an 80% rewriteusing a lot of newer Qt technologies. And there was a lot of cleaning up thatold code base that had been long overdue.

• Multi-selection:

  • Both views (the tree and the treemap) now supportextended selection,i.e. you can select more than one item. This was the most requested featurefor the last KDirStat. Now you can select more than one item at the sametime to move it to the trash can, to directly delete it or whatever.

  • Tree view:

    • Shift-click: Select a range of items.
    • Ctrl-Click: Select an additional item or deselect a selected one.

  • Treemap:

    • Ctrl-Click: Select an additional item or deselect a selected one.

    • The current item is highlighted with a red rectangle, all other selectedones with a yellow rectangle. If the current item is not also selected,it has a dotted red outline.

    • Middle click: This does the same as a left click, plus it also highlightsthe parent directories of the current item. Everything outside thoseancestors is slightly dimmed. If the same item is middle-clicked again,that highlighting is removed.

      This also works with Ctrl-middle click and Shift-middle click.

• Proper output of cleanup actions with different colors for the commands thatare executed, for their output and for error messages (see screenshotabove). That output window can be configured to always open, to open after acertain (configurable) timeout, or only if there are error messages -- or notat all, of course. If things go wrong, you can kill the external commandstarted by the cleanup action from there. You can zoom in and out (increaseor decrease the font size) as you like.

• File type statistics window. WinDirStat has it, and users wanted it inQDirStat, too. Since filename extensions (suffixes) don't have as muchsemantics in Linux/Unix systems as they do in Windows, many files arecategorized as "Other". This is a known limitation, but it's a limitation ofthe whole concept of using suffixes to categorize files by type. And no,checking file headers for magic byte sequences like the "file" command doesis not an option here; QDirStat would have to do that for (at least) all the30,000+ files typically listed under the "Other" category. So we'll have tolive with that limitation.

• Locate files by file type window. If you double-click on any of the filenameextensions (suffixes) in the file type statistics window, you will getanother window that lists all the directories that contain files of that typeincluding the number and total size of those files. You can double-click eachof those lines, and that directory will open in the main window with thefiles of that type preselected so you can start cleanup actions like movingthem to trash or converting them to a better format (.bmp -> .png)immediately.

• File size statistics window with histogram, percentiles, buckets and a lot ofdocumentation that everybody should be able to understand. Even if (or,better yet, in particular if) your math teacher or statistics professor neverexplained it properly, please have a look at it.

• File age statistics window: This lists the number and total size of changedfiles by years and for recent (13-24) months. You can see in what time framethere was any activity (i.e. any changes) in a directory tree, i.e. when itlast was in active use; or if it might be a good candidate to be moved toarchive media.

• Packages view: Show installed packages and their files in the tree. Supportedfor all Linux distributions using any ofdpkg,rpm,pacman as theirlow-level package manager or any higher-level package manager likeapt,zypper etc.; more details atPkg-View.md.

• Unpackaged files view: Show a directory tree, but ignore all files thatbelong to an installed software package. Those ignored files are displayed ina special branch in the tree view, and they are not displayed atall in the treemap. This is useful to find files that were manuallyinstalled by asudo make install command. More details atUnpkg-View.md.

• New macros to use in cleanup actions:

  • %d : 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".The fallback is "xterm".

  • %filemanager : File manager application of the current desktop; one of"konqueror", "nautilus", "thunar", "pcmanfm". The fallback is "xdg-open".

• Which desktop is used is determined by the$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP environmentvariable. Users can override this with the$QDIRSTAT_DESKTOP environmentvariable, so you can get, say, the Xfce terminal or file manager despitecurrently running KDE if you set

  export QDIRSTAT_DESKTOP="Xfce"

• Of course, you can still simply use your favourite file manager if you simplychange %filemanager in the default "Open File Manager Here" cleanup action tothe command to start it.

• You can now select the shell to use for the cleanup commands:

  • $SHELL (the user's login shell) - using the same environment, syntax andwildcard etc. behaviour of the shell the user is used to.
  • /bin/bash for well-defined behaviour for wildcards etc.
  • /bin/sh as a last resort (which might be a simplisticdash on Ubuntu).

• Mouse actions in the treemap window:

  • Left click: Select item and make it the current item.
  • Right click: Open the context menu with cleanup actions and more.
  • Ctrl+Left click: Add item to selection or toggle selection.
  • Middle click: Like left click, but also show directory borders.
  • Ctrl+Middle click: Like Ctrl+left click, but also show directory borders.
  • Double click left: Zoom treemap in.
  • Double click middle: Zoom treemap out.
  • Mouse wheel: Zoom treemap in or out.

• You can configure what columns to display in the tree view and in whichorder. The only thing that is fixed is the "Name" column which is alwaysthere and always the first (leftmost). Use the context menu in the treeheader to unlock column widths. Drag columns to the left or right to changetheir order.

• Exclude rules are now greatly simplified. They no longer always get theentire path to match which requires quite complex regexps; by default, theyonly get the last path component -- i.e., no longer"/work/home/sh/src/qdirstat/src/.git", but only ".git". You can now even tellthe exclude rule to use a simplified syntax: "FixedString" or "Wildcard" inaddition to the normal "RegExp". The old behaviour (matching against the fullpath) is still available, though.

• Configuration dialog for exclude rules -- see screenshots.

• "Find" function for files, directories and symlinks: Search the scanned treefor them by name with wildcards, regular expressions or fixed strings("begins with", "ends with", "contains").

• Bookmarks for directories that you visit often.

• Subvolume detection for Btrfs. Btrfs subvolumes are just ordinary mountpoints, so normally QDirStat would stop scanning there, leaving a large partof a Btrfs partition unaccounted for. But for each mount point found whilescanning a directory tree, QDirStat checks /proc/mounts or /etc/mtab if ithas the same device name as its parent directory, and if yes, considers it asubvolume and continues scanning.

• Actions to go one directory level higher or to the toplevel: Context menu andmenu "Go To" -> "Up One Level" or "Toplevel". This is useful if you clickedon a file in the treemap that is deep down in some subdirectory, and you wantto know what subdirectory that is: Simply click "Go Up" twice (the firstclick will get you to the pseudo subdirectory, the second one to thereal one).

• Open all tree branches up to a certain level and close all other ones: Menu"View" -> "Expand Tree To Level" -> "Level 0" ... "Level 9".

• The total sum of the selected items (subtrees) is displayed in the statusline if more than one item is selected.

• Icons are now compiled into the source thanks to Qt's resource system; nowit's just one binary file, and nothing will go missing. No more dozens oflittle files to handle.

• The build system is now Qt'sQMake. I got rid of thatAutoTools(Automake, Autoconf, Libtool) stuff that most developers find intimidatingwith its crude M4 macro processor syntax. QMake .pro files are so muchsimpler, and they do the job just as well. And no, it will definitely neverbeCMake: I don't like that thing at all. It's just as much as a PITA asthe AutoTools, just not as portable, no usable documentation, it's changingall the time, and those out-of-source builds are a royal PITA all on theirown with constantly having to change back and forth between source and builddirectories.

• QDirStat now has its own log file. It now logs to/tmp/qdirstat-$USER/qdirstat.log (where $USER is your Linux user name).No more messages on stdout that either clobber the shell you started theprogram from or that simply go missing.

• No longer depending on dozens of KDE libs and a lot of KDE infrastructure; itnow only requires Qt which is typically installed anyway on a Linux / BSD /Unix machine with any X11 (graphical) desktop.

• It should still compile and work with Qt4. We now have a contributor who isvery interested in that (Michael Matz), so it should be possible to maintainthis compatibility.

• Slow down display update from 333 millisec (default) to 3 sec (default) withqdirstat --slow-update orqdirstat -s. The slow update interval can becustomized in~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf:

  [DirectoryTree]SlowUpdateMillisec = 3000

Features ported from the old KDirStat:

• Fast and efficient directory reading.

• Not crossing filesystem boundaries by default so you can see what eats upall the disk space on your root filesystem without getting distorted numbersdue to all the other filesystems that are mounted there. If you absolutelywish, you can use "Continue reading at mount point" from the context menu orfrom the "File" menu -- or configure QDirStat to always read across filesystems.

• Efficient memory usage. A modern Linux root filesystem has well over 800,000objects (files, directories, symlinks, ...) and about 100,000 directories.This calls for minimalistic C++ objects to represent each one ofthem. QDirStat / KDirStat do their best to minimize that memory footprint.

• Hierarchical tree view that displays accumulated sums in each branch,together with a percent bar so you can see at a glimpse how thesubdirectories compare with each other.

• All numbers displayed human readable -- e.g., 34.4 MB instead of 36116381Bytes.

• All size units are 1024-based, i.e. 1 kB = 1024 Bytes; 1 MB = 1024 kB; 1 GB =1024 MB.

• In the tree, also displaying the exact byte size as the context menu (rightclick).

• Each tree level uses another color for that percent bar so you can easilycompare subdirectories even if some of them are opened in the tree.

• If a directory has files and subdirectories, all files in that subdirectoryare grouped into a pseudo directory (calleddot entry in theQDirStat sources) so you can compare the disk usage of files on thatdirectory level with the subdirectories.

• Displaying the latest modification time of any object in each branch. You caninstantly see in what subdirectory where any changes lately. You can sort bythis column, of course.

• Treemap display. Treemaps are a way to visualize hierarchical datastructures, invented by Ben Shneiderman. Basically, the hierarchy isflattened and each level grouped in a rectangle, inside which it is againsubdivided in rectangles. The area of each rectangle corresponds to the sizeof each item or subdirectory. For the purposes of QDirStat, it is enough toknow that a large blob corresponds to a large file; you can instantly seewhere large ISOs or movies are.

• You can zoom the treemap in and out (Ctrl + / Ctrl - / mouse wheel / menu /tool bar) to see more details of directories that are otherwise dominated bylarger ones.

• You can move the boundary between treemap and tree view up and down as youlike. You can also get rid of the treemap completely (menu "Treemap" -> "ShowTreemap" or F9 key)

• Treemap and tree list view communicate. Select an item in one view, and it isalso selected in the other. If you click on that large blob in the treemap,it is located in the tree view, all branches up to its directory are opened,and the tree view scrolls to that item.

• Cleanup actions. Once you know what is consuming the disk space, you canstart cleanup actions from within QDirStat to reclaim disk space - or toinvestigate further if you can safely delete a file. You can create your owncleanup actions (as many as you like), and there are some predefined ones:

  • Open file manager here. This will start a file manager in the directory ofthe current item. QDirStat tries its best to guess the name of the relevantfile manager application for the current desktop, based on the$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP environment variable. You can override this with the$QDIRSTAT_DESKTOP environment variable.

  • Open terminal window here. In most cases, this is much easier than tonavigate to that directory with 'cd' in an already open terminal window andusing tab-completion numerous times. As with the file manager application,QDirStat tries its best to guess the name of the relevant terminal windowapplication for the current desktop.

  • Move to trash bin. QDirStat has its own implementation of the XDG trashspecification.

  • Delete immediately.

  • Compress: Create a compressed tar archive from a directory and then deletethe directory.

  • Delete junk files: Backup files left behind by editors, core dumps.

  • All predefined cleanup actions are fully configurable, of course. You canchange any of them, disable them, or delete them.

• You can copy the complete path of the selected file or directory to thesystem clipboard and paste it to another application.

• Reading and writing cache files:

  • This is mostly meant for remote servers in some server room somewhere:Rather than installing the Qt and X11 runtime environment and runningQDirStat over remote X (ssh with X forwarding), you can run the suppliedqdirstat-cache-writer Perl script on the server, copy the resulting cachefile to your desktop machine and view the content there with QDirStat.

  • For large directories (archives etc.) that don't change that much, you canalso generate a QDirStat cache file (either with the Perl script or withQDirStat itself) and save it to that corresponding directory. If QDirStatfinds a file .qdirstat.cache.gz in a directory, it checks if the topleveldirectory in that cache file is the same as the current directory, and ifit is, it uses the cache file for that directory rather than reading allsubdirectories from disk. If you or the users of that machine use QDirStatoften, this might take a lot of I/O load from the server.

  • If you use the '-l' option of the qdirstat-cache-writer script, it uses thelong file format with a complete path for each entry, so you can use thezgrep command with it as a replacement for thelocate command.

  • The KDirStat / QDirStat file format is well documented and very simple. Itseems to be used by a number of admins and some backup software.See also the specification in the doc/ directory:https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/doc/cache-file-format.txt

  • You can specify a cache file to read directly at the command line:

    qdirstat --cache cache-file

• Other command line options: See

  qdirstat --help

(Compared to the old KDirStat)

• Pacman animation
• KIO slave support
• Feedback form

New 2024-02-13:

Platform binaries built by Jesus Herrera Arroyochuy.max@gmail.com

athttps://github.com/jesusha123/qdirstat-macos

(go toReleases at the right side panel)

and via Homebrew.

See Jesus Herrera'sbuild instructions.

Notice that those instructions are also based on using the original QDirStatsources from here, so you are not putting anything at risk.

There is no native Windows version, but you can use thedocker container.Other than that, there isWinDirStat.

QDirStat packages for openSUSE Tumbleweed / Leap 15.x and SLE (15, 12)(Notice that Leap 15.3 is wrongly sorted into the SLE category, not openSUSE as it should):

• Download page for thelatest stable release

• Download page for thecurrent development version (git master)

  Since this version is in development, it may be not quite as stable andreliable as the latest official stable release, although the QDirStatdevelopers try their best to keep it as stable as possible.

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=qdirstat&searchon=names

https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=qdirstat

https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/qdirstat/qdirstat/

There are currently two publicly available docker containers for QDirStat:

• @jlesage'sdocker container for QDirStat

• Thelinuxserver.io docker for QDirStat

(see their respectiverelease pages for more detailed information about theQDirStat version they provide)

Those containers make QDirStat usable even on non-Linux / non-Unix systems suchas Windows or macOS.

Docker is basically a virtualized environment to run software that was designedfor a different operating system.

It is very much like using VmWare or VirtualBox, but with much less overhead:You don't have to install that other system first and then on top of that theapplication that you really want to run. A docker container contains everythingthat is needed, and it is preconfigured for that application.

• Download and installDocker Desktop for Windows
• Use the Docker Desktop for Windows to launch theQDirStat Docker (as a Linux container)
• Adapt the command line so the disk that you want to explore is used

More information:

• https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/install/
• https://docs.docker.com/get-started/

Notice that for most mainstream Linux or BSD distributions you don't have tobuild your own; you can simply install a ready-made package from your normalpackage manager.

Make sure you have a working Qt 6 build environment installed. This includes:

• C++ compiler (gcc recommended)
• Qt 6 runtime environment
• Qt 6 header files
• libz (compression lib) runtime and header file

If anything doesn't work, first of allmake sure you can build any of thesimple examples supplied with Qt, e.g. thecalculator example.

Install the required packages for building:

sudo apt-get install build-essential qtbase6-dev qt6-5compat-dev zlib1g-dev

Dependent packages will be added automatically.

If you also have a Qt4 or Qt5 development environment installed, you might haveto select the desired one viaqtchooser:

sudo apt-get install qtchooserexport QT_SELECT="qt6"

Install the required packages for building:

sudo zypper install -t pattern devel_C_C++sudo zypper install qt6-widgets-devel qt6-qt5compat-devel zlib-devel

Open a shell window, go to the QDirStat source directory, then enter thesecommands:

qmake6make

sudo make install

or

su -c make install

The default setup installs everything to/usr. To install to anotherdirectory, setINSTALL_PREFIX duringqmake6.

qmake6 INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local

See fileContributing.mdandGitHub-Workflow.md

See fileTroubleshooting.md

• OriginalKDirStat (source code)
• K4Dirstat (source code)
• WinDirStat (for Windows)
• Disk Usage Tools Compared: QDirStat vs. K4DirStat vs. Baobab vs. Filelight vs. ncdu (including benchmarks)
• XDG Trash Spec
• Spatry's QDirStat Review on YouTube

Of course, don't forget to check out thedoc directory.

Repology: QDirStat versions in Linux / BSD distributions:

(click for details)

QDirStat is Free Open Source Software.

If you find it useful, please consider donating.You can donate any amount of your choice via PayPal: