"Where did my disk space go?" is a question du answers grudgingly, in a flood of numbers you then have to sort and interpret. dust answers it at a glance. It's a Rust tool that scans a directory and shows you, as a colorized tree with bars, exactly which subdirectories are consuming the most space - biggest offenders first, sized to your terminal, no flags required.
Disk Usage You Can Read
Run it and you immediately see the culprits:
# Analyze the current directory
dust
# A specific path, limited depth
dust -d 2 ~/projects
# Show the largest items only
dust -n 20
Instant and Intuitive
dust walks the tree in parallel so it's fast even on large directories, and the visual output - indented tree, percentage bars, human-readable sizes - means you find the space hog in seconds instead of piping du through sort and squinting. It's the tool you reach for the moment a disk fills up.
Rough Edges and Limitations
- An overview, not an audit. It shows where space goes, not a full interactive cleanup like some TUI tools.
- Read-only. It finds big directories; deleting is still your job.
- Big scans take a moment. Enormous trees still need to be walked.
The next time something warns you about disk space, dust turns a tedious investigation into a five-second answer.
Internal link suggestion: link "interactive cleanup" to the gdu post for a TUI take on the same job.