2 unstable releases

0.3.0 Mar 26, 2023
0.2.0 Oct 26, 2022

#955 in Filesystem

34 downloads per month
Used in spacedisplay

MIT/Apache

99KB
2.5K SLoC

spacedisplay-rs

Build

Simple, cross-platform and lightweight terminal app to scan and analyze used disk space

demo

Features

  • Fast scanning and low memory footprint (~45MB per 1M files)
  • Delete files from app
  • File changes are detected so file system can be modified from outside. On Linux this is limited by inotify limits.
  • Rescan directories manually if file changes were not detected
  • Terminal UI that allows to use it through SSH
  • Small (~1MB on Windows and ~5MB on Linux), self-contained binary without extra dependencies

Installation

GitHub Releases

Check out GitHub Releases page for the latest build.

Cargo

You can install spacedisplay using cargo:

cargo install spacedisplay

Basic usage

Run the binary in your terminal. If launching without arguments, help screen will be opened with explanation over controls:

Key Action
H, F1 Open Help/Controls screen
F Open Files screen
S Open scan statistics
Q Quit
N Start new scan (opens dialog with available mount points)
R, F5 Rescan currently opened directory
Up/Down Move up and down inside files list
Enter, Right Open selected directory
D Delete selected directory/file (opens confirmation dialog)
Esc, Backspace, Left Go to the parent directory

Press N to open New scan dialog and select mount point that should be scanned. Files screen will be opened after scan is started. Scan statistics dialog can be opened by pressing S. While files list is opened, all changes in file system are tracked (from external apps too).

Performance

spacedisplay is efficient in both speed and memory footprint. So scan speed is mainly limited by disk access to gather metadata. Here are some test results with time in seconds that takes to fully scan root partition.

Platform Files+Dirs SpaceDisplay File Manager
Windows 10 730K 13.2s 38.2s
Kubuntu 700K 1.8s 3.8s
macOS Big Sur 61K 1.4s 2.0s

In test above default file manager is Explorer on Windows, Dolphin in Kubuntu, Finder in macOS.

spacedisplay is also lightweight in terms of memory usage.
To scan 1M files it uses only ~45MB of RAM (measured in Ubuntu 22.04).

Performance tests

Performance of spacedisplay can be measured (relatively to other tools) via performance.sh (on Linux and macOS) and performance.ps (on Windows). For performance measurement hyperfine is used. On Windows you will also have to enable execution of scripts:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser

These scripts don't measure actual hard drive speed since warmup is used and filesystem information is cached at OS level. On first run scan time will be much higher due to slow calls to hard drive.

Results on some platforms:

Manjaro 22.0.5 (600k files)

Command Mean [s] Min [s] Max [s] Relative
spacedisplay 1.252 ± 0.014 1.235 1.281 1.00
du -sh 1.868 ± 0.037 1.830 1.965 1.49 ± 0.03

macOS 11.7 (65k files)

Command Mean [s] Min [s] Max [s] Relative
spacedisplay 1.211 ± 0.055 1.153 1.343 2.98 ± 0.14
du -sh 0.407 ± 0.003 0.404 0.412 1.00

Windows (60k files)

Command Mean [s] Min [s] Max [s] Relative
spacedisplay 0.561 ± 0.013 0.544 0.587 1.00
dir /s 1.647 ± 0.107 1.515 1.816 2.94 ± 0.20

License

Licensed under either of

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

Dependencies

~3–19MB
~232K SLoC