QDirStat Development History

This is more verbose than a traditional change log, thus the unusual name of this file.

See the README.md file for the latest news:

https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/README.md

QDirStat History

2020-06-14
- Now displaying the allocated size for very small files (8 kB (2 clusters) or less) in a much more subdued way so it's still there, but less distracting.
- If a file is wasting very much space (i.e. if it uses 33% or less of its allocated disk space), now displaying the allocated size in bold in the "Details" panel to draw more attention to the fact. This affects pretty much all tiny files with 1360 bytes or less since the cluster size of most (all?) Linux filesystem is so large (4 kB for ext4, XFS, Btrfs).
Screenshot for both changes at GitHub Issue #134.
2020-06-13
- Now automatically reopening the old current branch in the tree view when using actions like "refresh selected" and "continue reading at mount point (GitHub Issue #135).
- Now automatically expanding the first directory level of a mount point after "continue reading at mount point".
- Now correctly labelling a mount point as mount point in the "Details" panel.
2020-06-12
- NTFS is now detected as "ntfs", no longer as "fuseblk" in the "Open Directory" and the "Filesystems" dialogs.
  
  This was fallout of GitHub Issue #88 (NTFS hard links).
- Now ignoring hard links on NTFS; the (current?) ntfs-3g implementation using fuseblk seems to disagree with Windows tools which files really have hard links. And in this case I tend to have more faith in the Windows tools. Now the total sizes of my Windows partitions as reported by QDirStat are much closer to the sizes reported by the df command, the statfs() system call and QDirStat's new "Filesystems" window.
  
  See also GitHub Issue #88.
2020-06-11
- Fixed GitHub Issue #134: Size Difference between QDirStat Reports and the "du" and "df" Commands:
  - Now also showing the allocated size in the details panel for files and directory trees. This can make a a big difference if there are lots of tiny files.
  - Now showing the allocated size for directories in the tree view, not only the sum of all the byte sizes of all the files in the subtree.
  - Now using the allocated size in the treemap so tiny files appear with their true size, no longer disappearing in the grey background: A 6 bytes file is now displayed with the 4 KB that it actually consumes, not just the 6 bytes of its content.
  More information and lots of screenshots at GitHub Issue #134.
2020-06-03
- New "Mounted Filesystems" window ("View" -> "Show Mounted Filesystems" or Ctrl-M):
  
  This shows information about "normal" mounted filesystems (excluding system mounts like /dev, /proc, /sys, bind mounts, Btrfs subvolumes) with usage data as reported by the filesystem itself. The "Reserved" column shows the disk space reserved for the root user on that filesystem, "Free" is the available space for non-privileged users.
  
  Sometimes the "Used" size reported here may be quite different from what QDirStat reports after reading that complete filesystem; this can be due to metadata, journals or snapshots.
- Added a document about Btrfs free size and how different tools tend to show different values: Btrfs-Free-Size.md
2020-05-27
- Implemented GitHub Issue #129: Option to continue reading at all mount points at once.
  
  Previously, you could choose to either always cross filesystems while reading directories, or you could later open the parent branch of the mount point in the tree view and then use "Continue reading at mount point" from the main menu / context menu.
  
  Now you can change this setting temporarily for the current program run; it will continue reading at "normal" mount points, i.e. excluding system mounts like /dev, /proc, /sys and also bind mounts or network mounts; but it still reads Btrfs subvolumes.
- This new option needed a check box in the "Open Directory" dialog; so from now on, QDirStat no longer uses the generic Qt file dialog, it has a custom one:
  
  In addition to that new check box at the bottom, there is now also a new "places" widget for quick access to the user's home directory and all ("normal", see above) mounted filesystems, including network mounts (NFS, Samba / Cifs).
2020-03-19
- Added a config option to ignore hard links.
  
  This is useful for a very small number of use cases. Hard links are not very common anymore in today's Linux / BSD / Unix-like systems, so most users won't have to bother with this at all.
  
  By default, QDirStat sums up the disk space for a file with multiple hard links for each hard link's share of the overall size: If a file with 1 MB has 4 hard links, for each of those 4 links QDirStat adds 1/4 of the size (i.e., 256 kB) to the parent directory. If all those 4 links are in the same directory, that's very simple: They add up to 4 * 256 kB = 1 MB, so the sum is correct.
  
  If those hard links are all in different directories, each directory only gets part of that disk space allocated, because in fact they share the disk space among each other; the total disk space sum taking all those directories into account is still correct, of course.
  
  The trouble starts when you want to make a backup of only one of those directories: Even though the disk space is still shared with other directories, on the backup medium, you still need the disk space for that complete file, i.e. the full 1 MB, not only that directory's share (256 kB). With a lot of hard-linked files, that can add up to a lot of difference between what QDirStat displays and what disk space you actually need for the backup.
  
  There was a user who makes heavy use of that, and for that kind of use case there is now the option to ignore hard links: In that case, QDirStat sums up the complete size (the full 1 MB) for each hard link of the file.
  
  While that is useful for this special case, and you can now see the total size that you will need for your backup medium for that one directory, the total size higher up in the directory tree where more than one of those directories that share hard linked files with each other is off: That file now appears 4 times with 1 MB each, so it will add up to 4 MB.
  
  So please use that config option only when you are aware of the consequences; this is a specialized option for rare, specialized use cases. It basically makes sense only if the other hard links are all outside the subtree that QDirStat displays.
  
  If in doubt, leave this option off (which is the default).
  
  More details at GitHub Issue #124.
2020-03-06
- Fixed the internal cache writer (the one called from the File menu, not the qdirstat-cache-writer Perl script): For files with multiple hard links, it wrote the wrong size to the cache file: The result of size / links, not size.
  
  This was part of GitHub Issue #124.
2020-02-24
- Fixed crash when terminating with Ctrl-Q while reading directories (GitHub Issue #122).

2020-02-13 New stable release: 1.6.1

Summary:
- Much better handling for "permission denied" errors while reading directories
- Now showing the exact byte size (134 495 994 Bytes instead of 128.3 MB) upon mouse click in the tree (right click) and in the details panel (left or right click)
- New optional tree column "Oldest File" (not enabled by default)
- Bug fix: Support for dark widget themes in file size histogram window
Details:
- If you start QDirStat with insufficient permissions, you could easily overlook large subtrees in the filesystem that consume disk space, but were not visible to you. They did get a special icon, but you would have to open the parent directory in the tree view to see that.
  
  Now, QDirStat notifies you in several ways:
  - All parent directories that contain a subtree that could not be read are now displayed in dark red in the tree view.
  - The Size field of those directories as well as other accumulated values (Items, Files, Subdirs) are now preceded with a "greater than" sign to indicate that there is most likely more, but that information could not be retrieved: ">7.2 MB" indicating that it's at least 7.2 MB and most likely more than that, but we don't know because one or more subdirectories could not be read.
  - A message panel in the main window between the tree view and the treemap with a message that some directories could not be read.
    
    You can close the message with the [x] close button on its right side, but you can also simply leave it open. This is a lot less obtrusive than a pop-up dialog, yet less temporary than a message in the bottom status line that will disappear in a few seconds or when anything else is reported.
  - Clicking on the "Details..." link in that message opens a separate window to report all directories that could not be read (typically because of insufficient permissions).
    
    This window is non-modal, i.e. you can still interact with the main window when it is open. Click on any directory that it lists to locate it in the main window: The tree view will open that branch and scroll to make it visible.
  - In addition to the "locked folder" icon, unreadable directories are shown in bright red in the tree view.
  - When an unreadable directory is selected in the tree view, the details panel now shows a large padlock icon and a message "[Permission Denied]", and the permissions are highlighted in red.
- You can now see the exact size in bytes both in the tree view and in the details panel: 134 495 994 Bytes instead of 128.3 MB. The field is still (somewhat) human readable with thousands separators (using blanks to avoid confusion with different decimal / thousands separators in different languages).
  
  This can make it easier to compare sizes with other tools that report them in bytes or that insist in using 1000-based units (QDirStat uses 1024-based size units: 1 kB = 1024 Bytes; 1 MB = 1024 kB; 1 GB = 1024 MB; etc.).
  
  Not using tool tips that appear automatically was a conscious decision: This level of detailed information is not needed that often, and tool tips get in the way whenever the mouse cursor lingers too long at an active spot. More often than not a tool tip obscurs other content that the user might want to read at that very moment. This is why in QDirStat in the rare cases that you are interested in those exact numbers, you have to click:
  - In the tree view, right-click a size field (a left click is used for selecting an item in tree views, so the context menu is pressed into service for that purpose (only for the size column)).
  - In the details panel, use left or right click. To indicate what fields can be clicked, they are now underlined when the mouse hovers over them.
    
    Hovering over fields that can be clicked shows them underlined, very much like a hyperlink.
    
    Clicking (left or right mouse button) shows more details: In this case, the exact byte size.
- There is now an optional new column "Oldest File" that shows the timestamp (the mtime) of the oldest file in a subtree. This is strictly about files; directories, symlinks and special files (block or character devices, FIFOs etc.) are ignored for this.
  
  This may be useful to spot some old cruft, for example leftover dot files in your home directory. Many programs generate such files when you start them for the first time, and they are rarely cleaned up when they fall out of use.
  
  Notice that this column is not enabled by default. If you would like to use it, switch to layout L2 or L3, right-click the tree header to open the columns context menu, select Hidden Columns, then Show Column "Oldest File".
  
  Of course you can also sort by this column to see the oldest files first (or last).
- Fixed text color in histogram in dark widget themes (GitHub Issue #117).

2020-02-12
- Fine-tuned error handling: If there is a "permission denied" error while reading a directory, this will now be shown much more clearly: There is now a clear distinction between "permission denied" any other generic "read error".
- For directories that could not be read because of insufficient permissions, now also showing an additional "locked" icon in the details panel, and coloring the permissions field in red to point to the cause of the problem.
  
  This color can be configured in ~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf:
```
[DetailsPanel]
DirReadErrColor=#ff0000
```
2020-02-11
- Now also showing the exact byte size of all size fields (of 1 kB and above) upon click in the "Details" panel. All clickable fields there are now underlined just like a hyperlink when the mouse hovers above them.
  
  I thought long and hard about using tool tips for that, but tool tips have a nasty habit of getting in the way and obscuring other information that the user might want to read; so I decided to use explicit mouse clicks.
  
  Hovering over fields that can be clicked shows them underlined, very much like a hyperlink.
Clicking (left or right mouse button) shows more details: In this case, the exact byte size.
2019-12-22
- Brought back the exact byte size as the context menu for the "Size" column in the tree:
  
  I.e. a right click on the size now shows the exact number of bytes to avoid confusion between those people who know what a Megabyte or Gigabyte is and those who introduced the confusion with 1000-based units vs. the good old 1024-based units that everybody in IT uses (including Microsoft everywhere in all versions of Windows).
  
  Back in the early days of computing, everything was easy: a Kilobyte was 1024 bytes, a Megabyte was 1024 Kilobytes, and Gigabytes were Science Fiction. Then some morons came along who insisted on 1000-based units like everywhere in Physics. And they and the Real Engineers introduced a foul compromise: Rename 1024-based units to Kibibytes, Mibibytes etc. and redefine Kilobytes to be 1000 bytes, Megabytes to become 1000 Kilobytes etc.; since that day there is confusion what is what.
  
  QDirStat always used and always will use 1024-based units.
2019-11-02
- Added a separate window to report all directories that could not be read (typically because of insufficient permissions). This window is opened only on request: When the user clicks on the "Details..." link in the panel message that reports that some directories could not be read.
  
  This window is non-modal, i.e. you can still interact with the main window when it is open. Click on any directory that it lists to locate it in the main window.
- Directories that could not be read are now also correctly reported in the unpackaged files view. Since they are empty when they could not be read, they will always end up in an <Ignored> branch which was previously not taken into account when reporting directories with read errors. This is now fixed.
2019-08-24
- If directories could not be read (typically because of insufficient permissions), now also posting a warning message in a new message panel.
  
  You can close the message with the [x] close button on its right side, but you can also simply leave it open. This is a lot less obtrusive than a pop-up dialog, yet less temporary than a message in the bottom status line that will disappear in a few seconds or when anything else is reported.
  
  The infrastructure for this enables multiple such messages that can be closed in any order (or not at all) as the user likes. Each message can have a "Details..." link (not used in these examples) to provide more information.
2019-08-22
- Improved handling for directories that could not be read.
  
  When you run QDirStat as a normal (non-root) user on system directories, it is very common that you get a "permission denied" error for directories that contain sensitive information. Such a directory gets a folder icon with a little lock to indicate that it's locked for you; there is no way to find out how much disk space it consumes.
  
  Now, such directories are also displayed in a special color (for now bright red) in the tree. All their parents are now displayed in another (slightly less obtrusive) color to indicate that you probably don't see the complete disk space information for that subdirectory.
  
  In those examples, The /etc/ssl/private directory does not have read permissions for non-root users; note the icon with the lock and the red text color.
  
  When you don't open that branch in the tree, you might not realize this; it's also in the log file, but most users don't read that. So its parent directories /etc/ssl and /etc are also displayed in a different color: Dark red in the light widget theme and yellow in the dark widget theme.
  
  In addition to that, the parent directories now show a > prefix for the size, number of items, number of files, number of subdirs fields to indicate that there may be more. This is a hint (not only, but also) for color blind users.
2019-08-12
- Toned down over-information to reduce clutter:
  - No longer showing column "Oldest File" in layout L2 by default.
    
    Of course, you can always re-enable this if you like: Just switch to layout L2, right-click on the column header to open the column context menu, then "Hidden Columns" -> "Show Column 'Oldest File'".
  - Removed "Oldest File" from the details panel for directories:
    
    I found that this does not contribute any useful information here, yet it adds to the screen clutter. Information about the oldest file in a subtree is useful to drill down deeper into the subtree to find it, so the tree view is much better suited for that; having that information in the details panel as well does not add any value for that procedure.
2019-08-03
- Fixed text color in histogram in dark widget themes (GitHub Issue #117).
2019-08-01
- Added a column "Oldest File" that shows the timestamp (the mtime) of the oldest file in a subtree. This is strictly about files; directories, symlinks and special files (block or character devices, FIFOs etc.) are ignored for this.
  
  This is the first simple approach for GitHub Issue #118. (Click for screenshot)
  
  This already helped me to spot some old cruft in my home directory; some dot directories from ancient versions of flashplayer and whatnot. This is more helpful than I initially thought.
- Added an entry "Oldest File" that does the same in the details panel for directories and packages.
2019-07-22 New stable release: V1.6
- Performance improvement while reading directories: On average 25% faster on normal (non-SSD) disks
  
  See also this article: Linux Disk Usage Tools Compared: QDirStat vs. K4DirStat vs. Baobab vs. Filelight vs. ncdu including benchmarks
- Vast performance improvement for huge directories (with 100.000 entries or more in a single directory) in the tree view: There is now instant response for jumping from the first to the last item, dragging the scroll bar or using the mouse wheel.
- New packages view: QDirStat can now visualize the file lists of installed packages:
  
  I.e. files are now grouped by the package they belong to, and in each subtree only the files that belong to the package are displayed: In this example, in /usr/bin only the chromium-browser binary is displayed, not all the other files in /usr/bin. This is intentional.
  
  You can display all installed packages with their file lists (but that takes a while), or you can select just a subset. Use Menu File -> Show Installed Packages or start QDirStat with a pkg:/ command line argument.
  
  As with the other package manager related features, this is supported for all Linux distributions that use one of dpkg, rpm or pacman (or any higher-level package manager based on any of those like apt, zypper etc.).
  
  More details at Pkg-View.md.
- New unpackaged files view:
  
  QDirStat can now visualize the files in system directories that are not packaged, i.e. that are not part of any file list of any installed software package.
  
  This can be useful to track down problems after package upgrades or after manually installing software with sudo make install.
  
  This is supported for all Linux distributions that use dpkg or rpm (or any higher-level package manager based on any of those like apt, zypper etc.).
  
  More details at Unpkg-View.md.
- New standard cleanup: Check File Type. This uses the file command to find out more detailed information what exactly a file is and displays it in the cleanup output window.
  
  More details, screenshots and how to get it if you already have an existing QDirStat cleanup configuration file (i.e. if you used QDirStat before): GitHub Issue #102.
- Implemented GitHub Issue #90: Support excluding directories containing a file with a specific name or pattern.
  
  Similar to some backup tools, you can now specify an exclude rule that lets you exclude a directory that contains a file like .nobackup or .qdirstatexclude.
- Greatly improved the man page; see man 1 qdirstat.
- Some bug fixes.
See also the release announcement.

2019-07-18
- Greatly improved the man page; see man 1 qdirstat.
  
  It started with the Debian maintainer of QDirStat asking for a man page because that's a standard requirement for Debian packages, and he even wrote the initial one; thanks again, Patrick!.
  
  That initial man page was very concise, and as QDirStat keeps evolving, not only was there an increasing number of command line options that was not documented in the man page (but of course when invoking the program with the --help command line option), but it also didn't explain much beyond the command line arguments.
  
  Now it contains not only the latest set of command line arguments including syntax and meaning of pkg:/ and unpkg:/ URLs, but also some general information what the program is (including what the treemap is) and how to use it.
2019-07-08

New unpackaged files view:

QDirStat can now visualize the files in system directories that are not packaged, i.e. that are not part of any file list of any installed software package.

This reads the complete file lists first (i.e. all file lists from all installed packages), then reads the requested directory as usual and puts the files that are packaged in a special branch <Ignored> in the tree view.

Those files are not displayed in the treemap, i.e. the treemap now only contains unpackaged files.

What is this Good For?
- Recovering a wrecked system after botched upgrades
- Recovering from too much sudo make install
- Fixing packaging problems, e.g. find leftover shared libs that tend to get in the way
- QA for distro release managers, QA engineers, PMs
- Satisfying user curiosity
- Because we can! ;-)
More details at Unpkg-View.md.

Comments and questions are welcome at GitHub Issue #110.

If you have a genuine problem with the new feature, please open a separate issue so it can be tracked properly.
2019-06-16
- Added documentation for the pkg-tools scripts.
  
  In short, they can be used to see unpackaged files on a system that uses one of the supported package managers (dpkg, rpm, pacman), but it's a bit of a clunky solution, so this is meant for advanced users only.
  
  ~~With a little bit of luck, there may be a better solution forthcoming with real integration into QDirStat's GUI.~~
  
  Update 2019-07-08: This real integration into the GUI is now available.
2019-05-12
- New standard cleanup: Check File Type. This uses the file command to find out more detailed information what exactly a file is and displays it in the normal cleanup output window (the orange text is the interesting part).
  
  More details and screenshots at GitHub Issue #102. Notice that you can also add this to any older version of QDirStat.

2019-05-11

Implemented the single-command call to get all file lists for all installed packages for rpm as well.

Now it's only pacman that still needs a separate external command for each package. If anybody knows how to do this for pacman as well, please let me know.

Another drastic performance improvement in the packages view:

Now down to 6.5 seconds on my system from initially 180 seconds for getting all file lists for all 2400 installed packages.

sec	Version	Description
180.0	ce3e793298	First pkg view; sequential separate `dpkg -L` calls
53.4	68038f0525	Separate `dpkg -L` calls in multiple background processes
38.5	ce54879a48	Single `dpkg -S "*"` call to get all file lists for all pkg at once
37.7	45b0a7a941	Use cache for `lstat()` syscalls
24.6	c50e9a7686	Use slower update timer for tree view while reading
6.5	a1043a20fb	Keep tree collapsed during reading

(Much) more details at GitHub Issue #101.

2019-05-10

Drastic performance improvements in the packages view:
- When reading many (configurable; right now 200) package lists, QDirStat no longer fires off a separate background process (6 in parallel at any given time) for each external command (dpkg-query --listfiles or rpm -ql or pacman -Qlp) and collects their output.
  
  Rather, it now tries to use a single external command that can return all file lists for all packages at once. It builds a cache from that and uses it to build the internal tree as it processes the read jobs for each package one by one.
  
  Right now this works for dpkg (dpkg -S "*"). Experiments show that it will also work for rpm (that's on the to do list).
  
  But there does not seem to be an equivalent command for pacman; it looks as if pacman can only return a file list for a single package or a list of all installed packages, but without any reference what package each file in that list belongs to. If anybody knows, please contact me.
- Now caching the result of lstat() syscalls for directories in the package view since most packages share common system directories like /usr, /usr/bin, /usr/share etc.; lstat() is an expensive affair, and even just avoiding to switch from user space to kernel space and back that often is a speed improvement.
- Reduced the display update inverval in the packages view. While reading package information, there is not all that much to see anyway. Yet constantly recalculating the column widths to make sure they fit their content is expensive. This is now done just every 5 seconds, not 3 times a second.
  
  There is even a noticeable difference when using the L1 layout and a smaller window size so there is less content to take care of.
The net effect of all this performance tuning is that on my machine (Xubuntu 18.04 LTS (i.e. dpkg) with ~2400 packages) reading all packages with all their file lists is now down to under 30 seconds from formerly 90 to 120 (it varied wildly).
2019-05-09
- Now no longer showing a directory's own size (the size of the directory node, not of any file contained in the directory) in the packages view: This distorted both the treemap and the total sums. Directories are typically shared between a lot of packages, so it does not make very much sense to add the size of a very common directory like /usr/bin or /usr/lib to the total size of each package that owns a file in any of them, thus accounting for those directories many times. On my system, /usr/bin is shared between 454 packages, so its 68 kB would be added up 454 times, thus adding up to 30 MB.
  
  In the treemap that meant that packages that install only one or two very small files (symlinks!) to a very common directory would show a lot of empty space; the 56 byte (or so) symlink would be completely dwarfed by the directory it is in, even if the directory only has 4 kB. A lot of such lone small files each in a separate directory meant a whole lot of empty space in the treemap, thus making packages very hard to compare against each other.
  
  Of course this means that the size of the directory nodes is now completely missing in the toplevel total sum (the Pkg:/ node in the tree), but that is much less distorting than multiplying each of those directory node sizes by the number of packages that have files in each of them.
- No longer regarding the directory's own mtime (modification time) in the packages view: The latest overall mtime in a subtree cascades upward, so any change in any subtree would affect the latest mtime in the higher tree levels. But if that change was caused by something outside of the current view, this is irrelevant. So if you want to know the latest mtime anywhere in package foo which includes the /usr/bin/foo command, it is irrelevant if one hour ago you installed or updated some other package which also installed some other commands to /usr/bin; you don't want that latest mtime of the /usr/bin directory to affect the display of every package that has a file in /usr/bin.
2019-05-04

New packages view: QDirStat can now visualize the file lists of installed packages:

I.e. files are now grouped by the package they belong to, and in each subtree only the files that belong to the package are displayed: In this example, in /usr/bin only the chromium-browser binary is displayed, not all the other files in /usr/bin. This is intentional.

You can display all installed packages with their file lists (but that takes a while), or you can select just a subset. Use Menu File -> Show Installed Packages or start QDirStat with a pkg:/ command line argument.

As with the other package manager related features, this is supported for all Linux distributions that use one of dpkg, rpm or pacman (or any higher-level package manager based on any of those like apt, zypper etc.).

More details at Pkg-View.md.

Comments and questions are welcome at GitHub Issue #100.

If you have a genuine problem with the new feature, please open a separate issue so it can be tracked properly.
2019-04-12
- Performance improvement while reading directories: 25% faster on my /work directory with an ext4 filesystem with 230 GB / 216k items on a rotational (non-SSD) disk; with cleared caches now 24.5 sec average compared to previously 32.5 sec average (with filled caches down to 1.5 from previously 2.0 sec).
  
  It now uses fstatat() (instead of lstat()) which accepts the file descriptor of an open directory, so glibc and the kernel save the time previously needed for parsing the path and locating the directory; that part will also bring some speed improvement for SSDs.
  
  In addition to that, the entries for each directory are now sorted by i-no before calling fstatat() so the kernel can now read the i-nodes on disk in sequential order, thus saving disk seek times. SSD users will not benefit from that since there are no disk seek times on an SSD.
- Now using the name as the secondary sort field in the tree view if the primary sort field (usually the size) is equal for two items.
- Vast performance improvement for huge directories (with 100.000 entries or more in a single directory) in the tree view: There is now instant response for jumping from the first to the last item, dragging the scroll bar or using the mouse wheel.
  
  It had turned out that by default the underlying QTreeView widget queries each item in turn how tall it wants to become (using the sizeHint()) which in turn had to query the font for each one for its metrics.
  
  QDirStat now sets the QTreeView's uniformRowHeights flag to indicate that all rows have the same height, so this only needs to be done for the first one, and the result is simply multiplied by the number of items.
  
  Amazingly enough it was not sorting the items (which is what comes to mind when there is such a performance bottleneck), no, it was someting as mundane as the widget having to figure out the proportions of its scroll bar slider vs. the scroll bar overall length. And for that, it needs to know the number of items (which is simple) and the height of each one (which was not).
  
  The reason why the widget does that is because each item might have a different font or a different icon, and then each item might have a different height. That uniformRowHeights flag tells it that this is not the case.
2019-04-06
- New article Linux Disk Usage Tools Compared: QDirStat vs. K4DirStat vs. Baobab vs. Filelight vs. ncdu including benchmarks: GitHub Issue #97
  
  (written in the GitHub issue tracker so users can join the discussion)
2019-04-05
- Performance boost for huge directories (with 100.000 entries or more in a single directory):
  
  A routine that counts the direct children of a directory now uses a cached value for each directory so it does not have to be recalculated over and over again even if nothing changed. Amazingly enough, this little thing had turned out to be the performance bottleneck that had made QDirStat prohibitively slow for such directories. It was not the sorting of the entries (the sort order was always cached), no, the problem was something as trivial as counting the children on the current level of the tree view.
  
  Of course, a directory that contains 100.000 entries in a single level still has quite some performance impact, but at least now it's tolerable. This was tested with up to 500.000 entries in a single directory (there is now a script that can create such a directory in the test/util directory of the source tree).
  
  Hint: Avoid dragging the vertical scroll bar of the tree view in such a directory; better use keyboard commands such as the Home or the End key. The scroll bar will make the underlying Qt widget go through every single entry in turn, and that will take a while (it will eventually become responsive again, though).
  
  Update 2019-04-12: This is now no longer an issue; using uniformRowHeights fixed that.
- Implemented GitHub Issue #90: Support excluding directories containing a file with a specific name or pattern.
  
  Similar to some backup tools, you can now specify an exclude rule that lets you exclude a directory that contains a file like .nobackup or .qdirstatexclude. The exclude rule configuration now has a new option for that:
  
  This makes it possible to reuse such files that are there anyway for some other tool and get a good idea how large the resulting backup will become.
  
  Since this change required some refactoring in a quite sensitive part (reading the directories), please watch out for possible bugs that this might have introduced and report it if you find something.

2018-11-07 New stable release: V1.5

Summary:
- (Optional) breadcrumbs navigation
- (Optional) a new "details" panel for the currently selected item
- (Optional) new tree columns: owner, group, permissions both in "rwxrwxrwx" and in octal format
- Package manager support for the major Linux package managers (dpkg / rpm / pacman) to see what package a system file belongs to.
- Quick-switchable different layouts for the main window
- A new "General" page in the configuration dialog
- Show in the window title if the program runs with root permissions (sudo etc.)
- (Optional) show the URL in the window title
- Some bug fixes
For more details, see the full release announcement.
2018-11-03

Added showing release notes (in an external web browser) to the "Help" menu ("What's New in this Release").
2018-10-26

The pre-1.5 Beta is out: QDirStat-1.4.97-Beta
2018-10-21
- Updated all screenshots to the latest Git source version in preparation for the upcoming pre-1.5 Beta.
- Added a little left margin to the "Latest MTime" column in the tree to make it look less overcrowded.
2018-10-20
- Reintroduced showing the elapsed time during directory reading.
  
  You might have noticed that QDirStat's performance has decreased with all the kernel patches to work around the Meltdown and Spectre security problems caused by CPU design; system calls have become a lot more expensive in terms of performance now. And QDirStat does a LOT of system calls while reading directories: opendir() / readdir() for each directory in the tree and lstat() for every single file or directory found in the tree: My 6.8 GB root filesystem has 275,000 items total and 25,500 directories which means well over 300,000 system calls. Every single one of them now causes kernel page tables to be cleared and restored for every switch between user space and kernel space, and that means quite some performance impact.
  
  This all means that it's now worthwhile again to display the elapsed time during directory reading. It used to be over in a heartbeat, so it wasn't worthwhile to display that; but that's different now.
- Added a General page to the configuration dialog for miscellaneous settings.
  
  This is a bit unorganized (as might be expected for misc settings), but those misc settings had accumulated over time, so I decided to finally add such a page.
  
  The settings were always accessible, but only by editing the config file (~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf) manually. For some settings you might still have to do that: Some are too exotic for general use, some others would confuse the average user much more than they would help.
2018-10-19
- Added different layouts to the main window:
  
  You can now switch between three (at the moment) different layout options for the upper half of QDirStat's main window.
  - Layout 1 (short): Display only a bare minimum of columns in the tree view, but show the new details panel on the right side. This is to minimize clutter in the tree view, yet keep all the information available.
  - Layout 2 (classic): Display the same columns as always in the tree view and additionally the new details panel on the right side.
  - Layout 3 (full): Display all available columns in the tree view, including the new file owner, group, permissions in both "rwxrwxrwx" and octal. But don't display the new display side panel so there is enough screen space to show all those columns.
  Switching between the layouts is as easy as pressing one of the three new buttons in the tool bar: L1, L2, L3. Or use the corresponding entries in the "View" menu. Or use the Alt-1, Alt-2, Alt-3 key combinations.
  
  For each view, you can individually configure what columns to display and whether or not to display the new details side panel and / or the new breadcrumbs navigator.
  
  The column widths are still configured globally (and this will remain like that); I experimented with that and found it very awkward to have to set all of them individually for each layout.
- We are approaching a new release (I guess you figured that with all the recent changes). Most likely there will be at least one Beta release (if there are problems maybe more) before the 1.5-stable release.
- There is still some (limited) time to add even more package managers if anybody feels inclined to submit patches. But please be advised that I can't do much maintenance for any of those since I don't have any system with them readily available to test anything; the ones that I have use dpkg or rpm.
- Fixed GitHub Issue #86: CacheWriter errors go unnoticed much too easily.
  
  This was a direct result of me giving in to nagging people wanting features of very limited value: The status bar flickering like crazy all the time because somebody back some time ago had wanted the current treemap tile's path and size in the status bar as the mouse hovers over it. GitHub Issue #30
  
  The effect is that nobody pays attention anymore at all to that status bar because it's flickering all the time anyway, so it has become useless as a tool to report anything of importance; and status bar messages are gone immediately, too, when the user happens to move the mouse across the treemap.
  
  As a consequence, I just disabled that by default; if anybody really wants it, edit the QDirStat config file (~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf) and enable it again:
```
UseTreemapHover=true
```
  Update 2018-10-20: This can now be changed in the new "General" page of the configuration dialog; no need to edit the config file manually.
2018-10-18
- Added support for the pacman package manager for Manjaro and Arch Linux.
  
  This should now cover the most common package managers for Linux to find out what package a system file belongs to: dpkg, rpm, pacman.
  
  As mentioned before, higher-level package managers such as apt, zypper, yum or front-ends like synaptic, PackageKit all use one of the lower-level package managers internally, so it doesn't matter if you never used one of the lower-level tools before.
- Tried to add support for the pkg package manager ("pkg info") for FreeBSD / OpenBSD, but unfortunately it only knows what package owns files of ports / 3rd party, not for the base system.
  
  The helpful people in the #freebsd IRC channel on freenode confirmed that. So this will have to wait until there is useful support for it from the system side on those platforms. BSD people, let me know!
2018-10-16
- QDirStat now shows [root] in the window title if it is running with root privileges.
- If invoked with sudo, now restoring the owner of the config files to the real user (if possible) if those file are in the user's home directory. Previously on some systems they were owned by root which meant they were no longer writable by the real user, silently discarding all subsequent changes to the configuration (including window sizes etc).
  
  This might be different depending on how sudo is configured on a system; on SUSE, it uses the root user's home directory, on Ubuntu, the home directory of the user who invoked sudo.
2018-10-07

Added better classification of files to the new file details view:
- MIME Category - this is the same as in the treemap colors, the same as you can configure in the MIME Categories page in the QDirStat configuration dialog. By default, it shows very broad categories ("Documents, "Music", "Images", "Videos", "Source Files", ...), but you can configure them to much finer detail if you wish.
- System file or not. This is important if you want to run any cleanup actions in that directory; you probably don't want to mess with system files, even if running QDirStat as root.
  
  A system file in this context is a file that is either owned by a system user (a UID < 500) or that is located in a known system directory (/usr, /lib, ..., but not /usr/local).
- For system files, the package that this file belongs to. This gives a surprising amount of insight (it was surprising to me, at least) where all the disk space on the system directories goes to, most importantly some of the big blobs in the tremap.
  
  As of now, this is supported for Linux systems using a package manager based on dpkg or on rpm:
  - Debian
  - Ubuntu / Kubuntu / Xubuntu / Lubuntu
  - SUSE (openSUSE Tumbleweed or Leap, SLES)
  - Red Hat (Fedora, RHEL)
  ... and dozens more (basically all that are based on any of the above).
  
  This works by running dpkg -S or rpm -qf as external commands, so this is a somewhat expensive operation. To keep the user interface responsive, QDirStat now has an "adaptive timer" for updating that information: Normally, the result is shown instantly, but if you click around wildly, there is a timer that is increased or decreased (thus "adaptive") for a delayed update after that timeout (0 / 333 / 1000 / 2500 millisec right now).
  
  It can even handle rpm installed as a foreign package manager on a dpkg based system (and the other way round); it tries the primary package manager first, then any others that are also installed.
  
  Please notice that apt, synaptic, zypper, pkgkit and whatnot are all higher level package managers that ultimately use one of the low level ones, so even if you only use a higher level package manager, it still works without restriction.
  
  If your system does not use dpkg or rpm, those who can are invited to contribute patches for other package managers; it's really simple:
  
  https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/src/PkgManager.cpp#L140
  
  The API is not final yet; there may be more regexp support in the near future (so it will only get simpler). But you get the idea.

2018-10-03
- Added a new details view next to the tree view. Of course this can be disabled (Menu View -> uncheck Show Details Panel).
  
  This view shows context-sensitive information about the currently selected item(s); see also the screenshots (still not complete, but you get the idea):
  
  What that details view displays so far:
  - File: name, type (file / symlink / block device / character device / FIFO), size, user, group, permissions both as rwxrwxrwx and octal, modification time.
  - Directory: name with appended slash to easier recognize what it is, type (directory), subtree total size, total items, total files, total subdirs, latest modification time in the entire subtree; directory own size, user, group, permissions both as rwxrwxrwx and octal, modification time of the directory node itself (that was never shown before).
  - pseudo directory: Only the subtree information like for a directory, but no user / group / permissions since there is no counterpart for it on the filesystem.
  - Multi-selection: Number of selected items, total size, number of files, number of directories, number of files in any subtrees of those directories. This should show a bit more clearly what is affected if you choose to delete all that selected stuff.
  The view can scroll, so extremely long file names (as are common e.g. below .git/objects directories don't blow this view up to take all the screen space away from the tree and the treemap.
- Unified the different size columns into one: No more "Subtree Size" and "Own Size" separately, but now just "Size". The reasoning used to be that there was no way to tell how large the directory node itself was. But that information is now readily available in the details view if anybody is really interested.
Plans for the immediate future:
- Add some package manager support, at least for the very common ones on Linux (deb and rpm so far): Find out what package a system file belongs to and show it (on demand or after a short delay) in the details view. This can be done even as non-root with some commands like dpkg -S or rpm -qf. There will probably be support for adding your own command lines in the config file if you use another package manager.
- Some simple checks if a file is probably a system file; for example, files below /usr/bin (and other very common system directories) and/or files that are owned by a user with a UID < 500 (or so) are very likely system files that should be very careful to delete. The details view should show you that; maybe there should also be a warning in the cleanup actions if any such files are affected by a potentially destructive cleanup action.
- Easily switchable different layouts for the tree columns and the details view:
  - Minimalistic: Only the bare essentials of columns plus the details view.
    
    This should remove a lot of the current clutter on the screen, and it should display the same information, only rearranged a bit. How often do you really need fields like number of items / files / subdirs in the tree view? They would be most useful there if you wish to sort the tree after any of them. How often do you do that? And with the new details view, the information is still available, but does not clutter the table.
  - Default: Pretty much what you can see now in the new screenshots
  - Maximum information: All columns, including the new user / group / permissions columns, but (to make space) no details view
  If it makes sense (not sure yet), maybe also user defined views (say, 3 of them?) that you can define to your personal liking. I kinda like how camera makers use that (U1 / U2 on Nikon cameras, C1 / C2 / C3 on Canon and Panasonic). I am not completely sure yet just how useful that is; I'll need to experiment.
2018-10-02 Implemented a breadcrumbs widget to show the current path and for easier navigation up the directory hierarchy. See also the new screenshots.

Of course this can be disabled (Menu View -> uncheck Show Current Path).
2018-09-27 Fixed GitHub issue #84: Crash if picking up a cache file in the starting directory (subtree root).

This was a crash that happened when users had used the supplied qdirstat-cache-writer script to generate cache files in certain directories for faster directory scanning (at the price of having slightly outdated data), and QDirStat was not started with that cache file as a command line argument, but it would find it while reading the directory at the starting directory (and only there). This was probably broken for a long time, yet nobody had noticed (or nobody bothered to write a bug report). This might be an indication that this cache file feature is not widely used, so only a small number of users seem to be affected. Anyway, this is now fixed.
2018-09-23 Implemented GitHub issue #80: Show directory/file user (owner), group and permissions in the tree view.

Those new columns are not visible by default. Use the context menu in the tree columns header to enable them. They might be useful for some users; for others, they may be just more clutter being displayed.

Sorting by those colums is somewhat basic; both user and group are sorted by the numeric uid or guid; the permissions are sorted by the numeric value of the mode field. Looking up user or group names is a somewhat costly operation. It might also make sense to order system files first (user with UID 0, i.e. root; other system users also have small UIDs.)

See issue #80 for a screenshot.
2018-08-26 Noah Davis (noahdvs) contributed a new application icon for QDirStat:

I had made the old icon myself back in early 2000 for the first KDirStat 0.86 release. I never liked it very much, but the new application just needed an icon. Finally somebody with more artistic talent than myself made one that looks a lot more professional. Thank you, Noah!
2018-04-26 Implemented GitHub issue #77: Show the current URL in the window title. This is disabled by default. You can enable it manually in the config file (~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf):
```
[MainWindow]
...
UrlInWindowTitle=true
```
Some day this will be configurable in a new tab in the configuration dialog, but right now there are only so few options that would go to such a "General" or "Misc" tab that it would look pretty lost and unorganized.
2018-02-08 Fixed GitHub issue #74: Crash deleting folder while scan is in progress

This fix comes on two levels:
- A fix on the GUI-level that simply makes sure that the "move to trash" action in the tool bar / context menu is disabled while a directory tree is read.
- A fix on the low-level internal classes for the in-memory directory tree and the read job queue: This now also makes sure that whenever a subtree is deleted from the outside (e.g. because of cleanup actions), any pending directory read jobs for that subtree are removed from the job queue.
2018-02-03 Fixed GitHub issue #72: Allow to specify install prefix

You can now install to another location like /usr/local if desired. The default remains /usr. See section Install to a Custom Directory.
2018-01-12 Some small fixes:
- Fixed duplicate keyboard shortcut for actions "Stop Reading" (now: Ctrl-S) and "Copy URL to Clipboard" (still Ctrl-C).
- Fixed exclude rules not matching correctly against direct root directory children: A rule that should match "/var" now works correctly. You'd need to specify "//var" in the rule which of course was wrong.
- Now only adding the default exclude rule ".snapshot" once. If you remove that one, it should no longer keep reappearing if there are no other exclude rules.
- Fixed some minor issues in the exclude rule configuration dialog with some widgets not being correctly disabled if they made no sense to use.

2017-06-04 New stable release: V1.4

It's about time to ship all those latest changes.
2017-06-04 Fixed problem with directories that have read, but not execute permissions thanks to slodki:

In that case, you'd get a warning in the log for every entry in such a directory, and it would get the wrong icon (a locked folder) and null values for all fields. Now checking for execute and read permission of the directory in advance and not even trying to read any contents (because the values would be bogus anyway).
2017-05-31 Fixed GitHub Issue #61: Files and directories with UTF-8 special characters in the name not read correctly when built with Qt 4.x

This happened only when QDirStat was built against Qt 4.x, but that is the default for NHellFire's PPA, so this affects all Ubuntu users who installed QDirStat from that PPA.

Thanks to slodki who pointed this problem out!
2017-05-12 Checked code with Coverity

Coverity offers free static code analysis for Open Source projects. This is really an outstanding tool, and it does a really thorough analysis.

You might be glad to hear that while it complained about some minor things, there was not a single issue that would have been user relevant (let alone any security problems - there were none). Still, I did my best to fix the small complaints it had, and now we are down to zero outstanding defects reported by Coverity in QDirStat's 130,000 lines of code.
2017-04-21 More consistency between file type and size statistics

Like the new file size statistics window, the older file type statistics window now uses the currently selected directory (in the tree view), not always the tree's toplevel directory. If nothing is selected, it still uses the toplevel directory.

That means that F3 no longer toggles that window, but re-populates it with the currently selected directory instead. This is consistent with the F2 view.

Of course, the "Locate Files by Type" window now is also restricted to that subtree which actually gives it better functionality if you know that you want to locate files only there.

This means that you can now select a subdirectory in the tree, open the file type statistics for it (F3 key), then select any filename extension (suffix) in that window and then open the file size statistics (F2 key) for that file type in that subtree.

Previously, you would have to start QDirStat to show only that directory, then open the file type statistics window (F3), then the file size statistics window (F2) from there.
2017-04-14 Let's do some real statistics

It's been a while since the last official news here, but I wasn't idle during that time:

This is a whole new kind of statistics in QDirStat showing how file sizes are distributed. You can start that for any selected directory (menu View -> File Size Statistics or F2) or from the _File Type Statistics" window if you select any filename suffix (extension) there and then File Type -> Size Statistics (or F2). In the latter case, you can see how large all your photos (.jpg), your videos (.mp4) or whatever are.

This new statistics window deals with a lot of things you might have come to hate at school or at university, and which your math teacher or your statistics professor never explained in a way that mere mortals can understand, so I added those explanations as a bonus. There is a landing page for that in that new window:

Or you might use this as a starting point.

Everybody thinking "I have no clue what this is all about", please have a look at the Median, Quartiles and Percentiles Explained document to convince yourself that really everybody can easily understand this.

I also opened a GitHub issue to discuss this; comments are welcome.
2017-03-10 Filling the gaps in the treemap

GitHub issue #58 shows that users feel under-informed when there are grey areas in the treemap. The explanation is simple: Treemap tiles are only displayed when they have at least a certain minimum size (by default 3 pixels). Otherwise the treemap just gets cluttered with tiny things that don't show any information whatsoever.

The remaining space is taken by its parent directory's tile. They were rendered just flat grey which makes their boundaries against each other invisible, thus giving the impression that there is nothing.

So I experimented with visible borders, but that completely destroyed the visual impression of the treemap because those borders were everywhere. Fill patterns also didn't help: They were just ugly, and there was no way to tell where one directory tile ends and where the next one starts.

Then I tried gradients. The first impression was good, but then I found that it was hard to tell which item was a (now over-emphasized) directory and which one a large file. Locating large files deep inside the directory hierarchy is the major strong point of the treemap visualization, so I wouldn't want to give that up. After playing a bit with the gradient parameters (toning it down and giving it just a little blueish tint) I ended up with this:

I think this is a good compromise.

Of course this is configurable: Edit ~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf:
```
[Treemaps]
...
DirGradientEnd=#707080
DirGradientStart=#606070
...
UseDirGradient=true
```
Beware that QSettings sorts the entries alphabetically, so the start is after the end (how philosophical...).

2017-03-05 New stable release: V1.3
2017-02-27 Implemented GitHub issue #30:

When hovering over a treemap tile, display the full path and the total size of that element in the status bar. When the hover ends (when the mouse cursor leaves the treemap tile), display the current selection again in the status bar.
2017-02-24 Improved logging: More secure and automatically log-rotating.

QDirStat now uses its own log directory /tmp/qdirstat-$USER (where $USER is your user name; the numeric user ID is now only used if the user name cannot be obtained). It no longer keeps one single log file growing, but starts a new one each time it is started. 3 old logs are kept; any older ones are deleted.

The permissions for that directory are set up in a pretty restrictive way (0700, i.e. rwx------) when it is created. If it already exists, QDirStat checks the owner and creates a new one with a random name if it is owned by anyone else than the user who started QDirStat.
```
[sh @ balrog] ~ 68 % ls -ld /tmp/qdirstat-sh
drwx------ 2 sh sh 4096 Feb 24 18:29 /tmp/qdirstat-sh
[sh @ balrog] ~ 69 % ls -l /tmp/qdirstat-sh
total 16
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sh sh 2067 Feb 24 18:29 qdirstat-00.old
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sh sh 2067 Feb 24 18:07 qdirstat-01.old
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sh sh 2067 Feb 24 18:07 qdirstat-02.old
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sh sh 2067 Feb 24 18:29 qdirstat.log
```
For anybody regularly watching the log file this means they will now have to use tail -F qdirstat.log rather than tail -f since the latter does not realize when the file it watches is renamed and a new one is created under the same name.
2017-02-23 Fixed GitHub issue #24:

During directory reading, subdirectories would get out of sync when opening a tree branch.

It looks like QDirStat's tree display was a bit too dynamic for the concepts of the underlying Qt classes (QTreeView / QAbstractItemModel): During reading, QDirStat would sort the tree by the number of pending read jobs. That number is constantly changing, so the sort order would also constantly need to change. This is very hard to do properly with the limitations those underlying classes impose; basically it would require a reset of all the data the QTreeView keeps, thus making it forget things like its current scrollbar position or which tree branches were expanded or collapsed. That would make the user interface pretty much unusable.

So the fix for this is to not sort by read jobs, but by directory names instead since they don't change all the time. The user can still sort by any other column, but that sort is a momentary thing that might become invalid moments later as data (accumulated sizes, number of child items) are updated. Everybody please notice that this is a known limitation and any complaints about that will flatly be rejected. The alternative would be to not allow the user to sort at all during directory reading, and that is certainly a lot less desirable.
2017-02-22
- @flurbius contributed a patch to switch the main window layout from tree view above and treemap below to side-by-side (Menu Treemap -> Treemap as Side Panel).
- Added new document GitHub-Workflow.md explaining how to work with GitHub and Git to contribute to QDirStat.
2017-02-20 Locating files by type from the File Type Statistics window

You can now locate files with a specific filename extension directly:

You select a file type (a filename extension) in the "File Type Statistics" window.
You click "Locate" or you double-click the item.
The "Locate Files" window opens.
You click a directory there.
In the main window, the branch for that directory opens, and all matching files are selected in the tree view and in the treemap.
You can now directly start cleanup actions for those files.

KDirStat

KDirStat is the predecessor to QDirStat. QDirStat is an 80% rewrite of the KDE3 based KDirStat.

KDirStat home page: http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/

Sources: https://github.com/shundhammer/kdirstat

KDirStat History

(Incomplete list, just highlighting important releases)

2006-06-01 KDirStat 2.5.3: The last KDE3 based version.
2006-01-08 KDirStat 2.5.2:
- New: Read and write cache files
2005-02-22 KDirStat 2.4.4
- New: Handle hard links and sparse files
2003-01-30 KDirStat 2.3.5
- New: colored treemap
2003-01-05 KDirStat 2.3.3
- New: Treemaps (monochrome only)
- Communication between treemap and tree list view: Select an item in one view, and it is automatically selected in the other one, too.
2002-02-25 KDirStat 2.0.0
- Complete rewrite for KDE 2 / Qt 2
- Doing internal caching and (very) lazy creating of QListViewItems for improved performance and resource consumption
2000-01-21 KDirStat 0.86 for KDE 1 announced -- the first public version.

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