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Comment by otterpro | Hacker News Reader

It feels like swiss army knife of 'ls' that tries to do everything in one, and I hope more features are added, such as showing directory size, which would be a killer feature. I hate using 'du' or 'ncdu'.

I installed in Ubuntu (and WSL) by downloading the zip file and also 1 dependency by `sudo apt-get install libgit2-24'

Edit: It's also fast, and I'm beginning to think Rust is really good for making speedy commandline tool, as I'm a big fan of 'ripgrep', another popular tool written in Rust.

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> such as showing directory size, which would be a killer feature.

'ls' (and 'exa') is nice because it's pretty fast. If I'm going to use 'du', I'm wading in with the assumption that it'll take a while. It'd be a cool option to add, but I don't think it should do it by default.

> I hate using 'du'

Why?

On the other hand, I like to have small tools that do one thing and do it well, and that you can combine to do more powerful things. Personal preference, I guess.

In my case the problem is I'm running out of disk space and need to find stuff to delete. So, `du -csh `. Wow, three huge directories. `cd dir1; du -csh `. Repeat. `du -d 3` would seem to be the solution, but it is pretty noisy. I really want something that prints all the "big" stuff in a tree, nicely indented and sorted by size. I end up using a KDE app ported to macOS that shows all the big files in packed rectangles, but can't remember the name.

What you're looking for is

  du -hc | sort -hn | tail

No need to visit subdirectories. Throw in a tee /tmp/du.out before the tail to make your life easier.

Ncdu is a command line application that does this (a tree with sizes)

Probably KDirStat / WinDirStat / Disk Inventory X

I have the same issue with the same solution. It’s called Disk Inventory X on macOS.

I think in a lot of cases it's kind of nice to just get this all in one command.

hmm, but is it important that the small tools are actually developed separately? or just that you can call them separately?

An example would be busybox, which can decide which executable to pretend to be by the target name.

Rust is my favourite language for code that has to run on end-users' computers. It's also my favourite language in general, but for that specific usecase it's leagues ahead of the competition in my opinion.

ripgrep is amazing. people are starting to do really cool stuff in rust (alacritty also comes to mind) -- it definitely makes me feel optimistic about the language. (i've never done more than just poke at it.)

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