dust

Dust is a modern, Rust-based alternative to the traditional du command that provides an intuitive visual representation of disk usage. Unlike standard disk usage tools, dust displays directory sizes with colored ASCII bars and intelligent tree visualization, making it immediately clear where your disk space is being consumed. The tool automatically recurses through directories to show the largest files and folders without requiring additional flags or piping through sort commands.

What sets dust apart is its smart visualization approach. It uses color-coded bars to show both the size and hierarchical relationship of directories, with different shades indicating parent-child relationships. The tool automatically limits output to fit your terminal height and intelligently selects the most relevant large directories to display. This makes it particularly effective for quickly identifying space-hogging files in complex directory structures.

Dust is designed for developers, system administrators, and anyone who needs to quickly analyze disk usage patterns. It handles edge cases well, such as not double-counting hard links and providing clear visual cues about file distribution within directories. The tool offers extensive customization options including filtering by file type, size thresholds, regex patterns, and various output formats including JSON for scripting purposes.

Installation

# via Homebrew
brew install dust

# via Cargo
cargo install du-dust