

History of the treemap filesystem viewers - batista
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/index.shtml

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morsch
I've never found the treemap view of filesystem viewers all that useful. Pie
charts aren't any better. A basic hierarchical list of directories sorted by
size is fine. I can use it interactively and drill down if I need more
information. Tree maps like this for example* seem to contain more information
than I can easily process.

The one thing I like about that one is that you get a quick, rough overview of
which file type (Applications, System, ...) use up how much space and where
they are located in the hierarchy. But I don't generally care about the latter
and the former would, again, best be served by a simple sortable list or tree
list.

* [http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/treeviz_colorful....](http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/treeviz_colorful.gif) from the article

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sho_hn
KDE provides a traditional treemap in Konqueror/fsview, but also this circular
design has proven popular in recent years: <http://kde-
apps.org/content/show.php/filelight?content=99561>

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febeling
Daisy Disk for Mac is missing from this list (or maybe they don't count their
visualization as treemap, but I think it is closely related and saw it
categorized as such).

<http://www.daisydiskapp.com/>

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ig1
It's worth noting that Treemaps have shifted over time from maps that were
often used to show complete filesystems with high-levels of depth, to
visualizations that showed data one-or-two level deeps. This later kind in
what you tend to see in newspapers and in financial data analysis.

If anyone's interested in generating Treemaps (especially of the later kind) I
wrote a JS library to generate them after being frustrated how ugly all the
existing off-the-shelf implementations were:

<https://github.com/imranghory/treemap-squared>

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nemo1618
I personally prefer WinDirStat: <http://windirstat.info/>

is there a definitive "best" treeviewer? In terms of how fast it's able to
scan your drive contents?

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stu_k
Personally I find treemaps hard to read, and for getting an idea of what's
taking up space on a disk I much prefer pie charts like [1]. My favourite for
Windows is Scanner by Steffen Gerlach[2]. I haven't found a good one for Mac
yet.

[1] <http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/scnshot.gif> [2]
<http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/>

~~~
vasi
There's a rough open source clone of Filelight for Macs[1]. Disclaimer: I'm
the original author, but no longer involved.

A commercial app in the same genre, DaisyDisk[2], is much more flashy and
polished. You can also get the KDE/Mac version filelight from MacPorts, as
part of package 'kdeutils4'.

[1] <https://github.com/jvhaarst/MacFileLight> [2]
<http://www.daisydiskapp.com/>

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cabirum
SpaceSniffer is an awesome free tool for Windows. Shame it didn't get a
mention.

<http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/>

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joeyh
My favorite use of a treemap viewer: <http://contemporary-home-
computing.org/1tb/archives/3297>

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spc476
fsm (from SGI---you can see it in action in the movie "Jurassic Park") was an
interesting filesystem viewer. It presented the filesystem in 3D on an
infinite plane. Directories were squat boxes, while files were tall and skinny
boxes sitting on directories. The size of the boxes reflected the size of the
directory/file (huge files literally stood out). Color was used to indicate
age---the older the file, the cooler and darker the color.

