dust

dust is a replacement for the Unix du (disk usage) command. Rather than dumping raw numbers, it renders an ASCII bar chart alongside a directory tree so you can immediately see which folders are consuming the most space — no sorting, grepping, or mental arithmetic required.

Features

• Visual bar chart — each entry gets a proportional bar relative to the largest item shown
• Tree view — shows the directory hierarchy so you understand where the bloat lives
• Smart units — automatically picks B / KB / MB / GB as appropriate
• Respects .gitignore — can skip ignored paths
• Configurable depth — control how deep into the tree to recurse with -d
• Parallel scanning — fast on large directory trees thanks to multi-threading

Installation

cargo install du-dust

Or via your package manager:

# Arch Linux
pacman -S dust

# macOS
brew install dust

# Debian/Ubuntu (via cargo-binstall)
cargo binstall du-dust

Usage

# Show disk usage of the current directory
dust

# Limit to 2 levels of depth
dust -d 2

# Show usage for a specific path
dust /var/log

# Show the largest N items only
dust -n 20

# Show apparent size (not block size)
dust -s

# Ignore specific directories
dust --ignore-directory target

Why not just use du?

A typical du -sh */ | sort -rh invocation gives you a flat sorted list with no context. dust shows the same information as a tree, with proportional bars, making it trivial to spot that your node_modules folder is 4 GB without having to mentally parse a wall of numbers.