What is duviz?

duviz is a (Python 3) command-line tool to visualize disk space usage.

It's like the plethora of desktop applications and widgets (e.g. Filelight, DaisyDisk, WinDirStat, JDiskReport, TreeSize, SpaceSniffer, ...), but instead of a fancy GUI with animated pie charts and shaded boxes you get a funky "ASCII art style hierarchical tree of bars" in your shell. If that didn't make a lot of sense to you, look at this example of this /opt folder:

$ duviz /opt
________________________________________________________________________________
[                                     /opt                                     ]
[____________________________________3.30GB____________________________________]
[                                    local                                     ]
[____________________________________3.30GB____________________________________]
[              var              ][        lib         ][ share  ][Libr][lib][]|
[_____________1.36GB____________][______925.47MB______][411.37MB][231.][222][]|
[           macports           ]|[gcc][gcc4][]|||      [][]||||||[Fra]|[gc] |
[____________1.36GB____________]|[250][226.][]|||      [][]||||||[231]|[21] |
[    software    ][distfile][]| |           ||  |      | ||||||||[Pyt] [x8]
[____785.31MB____][421.56MB][]| |           ||  |      | ||||||||[231] [21]
[gc][][]||||||||||||||||||||[]               |            ||| |  [Ve]  ||[]
[17][][]||||||||||||||||||||[]               |            ||| |  [23]  ||[]

Features

• Basically it consists of just one Python 3 script duviz.py. No installation required: put it where you want it. Use it how you want it.
• Only uses standard library and just depends on du and ls utilities, which are available out of the box on a typical Unix platform (Linux, macOS)
• Speed. No need to wait for a GUI tool to get up and running, let alone scanning your disk. The hard work is done by du (or ls), which run an C-speed.
• Progress reporting while you wait. Be hypnotized!
• Detects your terminal width for maximum visualization pleasure.
• Not only supports "disk usage" based on file size, but also allows to count files (inode count mode) or give a size breakdown of ZIP or tar files.
• Option to use terminal colors for the boxes instead of ASCII art

Installation

Pip based

duviz can be installed with pip in a desired virtual environment:

pip install duviz

which will install a duviz command line utility in your environment.

If you already have pipx on your toolbelt, you might prefer to install duviz in an automatically managed, isolated environment with pipx install duviz.

With Homebrew

duviz can also be installed with Homebrew through the soxofaan/duviz tap:

brew install soxofaan/duviz/duviz

No installation

The file duviz.py is also designed to be usable as a standalone Python script, without having to install it. Download duviz.py and just run it:

python path/to/duviz.py

Python 2 Support

duviz was originally (2009) a Python 2 script, and started supporting Python 3 around 2016. With the end of life of Python 2 nearing in 2019, support for Python 2 was dropped. The Python 2 compatible version can be found in the py2-compatible branch (last release: 1.1.1).

Usage

If you run duviz without arguments, it will render the disk usage of the current working folder. If you specify one or more directories, it will render the usage of those directories, how intuitive is that!

Instead of size in bytes, you can also get inode usage: just use the option --inodes (or -i in short).

If you directly pass duviz a ZIP or tar file, it will visualize the size breakdown of the file tree in the ZIP/tar file. In case of ZIP files, the compressed size will be shown by default (option --unzip-size will toggle showing of decompressed size). For tar files, only the decompressed size is available.

Run it with option --help for more options.