Qt-based directory statistics
(c) 2015-2023 Stefan Hundhammer Stefan.Hundhammer@gmx.de and 2023-2024 Ian Nartowicz
Target Platforms: Linux, BSD, Unix-like systems
License: GPL V2
Updated: 2024-04-03
Main window screenshot - note the multi-selection in the tree and the treemap
This project is a fork of QDirStat ( see https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat for the original). It was initially to finish the Treemap work that I started at QDirStat, then to port to Qt6, and then a lot more. It corresponds approximately to QDirStat 1.9, but without bookmarks. It is essentially backwards (and so far forwards) compatible with QDirStat, although the configuration settings are in a different directory, so you can run both at once and independently, but would have to copy the old configuration files to keep settings from QDirStat.
The main changes:
- the Treemap is better-looking, more-easily configurable, multi-threaded to reduce contention with the rest of the application, and overall a lot faster;
- the Mime categorizer is faster and follows better precedence rules for files which match multiple patterns;
- the program is ported to Qt6, while still being compatible with Qt5, but not Qt4;
- symbolic links are now supported for dpkg packages, essential for many Debian and Ubuntu installations with merged /usr directories, and the fairly uncommon diversions are also supported;
- a number of crashes and freezes have been fixed, as well as lot of less serious problems;
- configurability is much improved with: an extra tab in the settings dialog for the Treemap; the settings on the general tab taking effect without having to restart the program; the toolbars can be hidden; hotkeys for toolbar and menu actions are all confgurable via the main config file;
- the cache mechanism has been expanded to include the full mode, uid, gid, and file allocations, so it captures essentially everything used in the program;
- better behaviour with dark themes: font colours follow the theme better or are configurable; icons are generally colourful although a specific dark theme icon set might be better;
- the file details panel has been improved and there are literally hundreds of other small interface improvements or just plain changes that I liked;
- the footprint is significantly reduced with the use of newer compiler features and minor streamlining of many code branches.
I've probably broken some things along the way, so my apologies in advance. I'm testing now and will look into any issues you find.
- Screenshot
- Related Software: KDirStat, WinDirStat, K4DirStat and more
- Building
- Contributing
- Troubleshooting
- Further Reading
- Donate
QDirStat is Free Open Source Software.
If you find it useful, please consider donating. You can donate any amount of your choice via PayPal:
KDirStat was the first program of this kind (combining a traditional tree view with a treemap), also written by the same author as QDirStat. It was made for KDE 1 back in early 2000; later ported to KDE 2, then KDE 3.
QDirStat is based on that code, but made independent of any KDE libraries or infrastructure, so it has much fewer library and package dependencies; basically only the Qt 5 libs and libz, both of which most Linux / BSD machines have installed anyway if there is any graphical desktop installed.
There are lots of articles and user forum comments about QDirStat being a "nice Linux 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, and somebody liked it so much that he wrote a Windows version based on that idea. That's a rare thing; usually people port Windows originals to Linux.
See also https://windirstat.net/background.html and the WinDirStat "About" dialog.
- Baobab
- Filelight
- ncdu
- du
See Disk Usage Tools Compared: QDirStat vs. K4DirStat vs. Baobab vs. Filelight vs. ncdu (including benchmarks) in the Wiki.
Make sure you have a working Qt5 or Qt6 build environment installed. This includes:
- C++-compatible compiler (gcc recommended)
- Qt runtime environment
- Qt header files
- libz (compression lib) runtime and header file
If anything doesn't work, first of all make sure you can build any of the simple examples supplied with Qt, e.g. the calculator example.
Install the required packages for building:
sudo apt-get install build-essential qtbase5-dev/qt6-base-dev zlib1g-dev
Dependent packages will be added automatically.
Recommended packages for developers:
sudo apt-get install qttools5-dev-tools/qt6-base-dev-tools qtbase5-doc/qt6-base-doc
qtbase5-doc-html/qt6-base-doc-html qtbase5-examples/qt6-base-examples
See also
https://askubuntu.com/questions/508503/whats-the-development-package-for-qt5-in-14-04
If you have both Qt5 and Qt6, you can use qtchooser or manually set the QT_SELECT environment variable to build against the correct version.
Install the required packages for building:
sudo zypper install -t pattern devel_C_C++
sudo zypper install libQt5Widgets-devel libqt5-qttools zlib-devel qt6?
If you have both Qt5 and Qt6 development environments installed, make sure that the correct version of 'qmake' is the first in your $PATH.
Open a shell window, go to the QDirStat source directory, then enter these commands:
qmake
make
sudo make install
or
su -c make install
The default setup installs everything to /usr. To install to another
directory, set INSTALL_PREFIX during qmake.
qmake INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local
Beware that some things might not work as expected; for example, you will not
get a .desktop file in the proper place to make QDirStat appear in any menus
in your graphical desktop environment or in the file manager. You will need to
copy the .desktop file manually to whatever directory your graphical desktop
environment uses somewhere in your home directory. Similar with the application
icon used in that .desktop file.
See file Contributing.md and GitHub-Workflow.md
See file Troubleshooting.md
- Original KDirStat (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 the doc directory.
QDirStat is Free Open Source Software.
If you find it useful, please consider donating. You can donate any amount of your choice via PayPal: