dust — A More Intuitive Version of du in Rust

Introduction

dust makes disk usage analysis instant and visual. While du requires piping through sort and head, and tools like ncdu require interactive navigation, dust shows a color-coded tree of the largest directories and files in a single command. It is the fastest way to answer "what is using all my disk space?"

With over 12,000 GitHub stars, dust is part of the Rust CLI renaissance — modern, fast alternatives to traditional Unix tools (alongside bat, fd, ripgrep, eza, and others).

What dust Does

dust recursively scans a directory, calculates sizes, and displays results as a visual tree with proportional bars showing relative sizes. The largest items appear at the bottom (or top with -r), making it immediately obvious where disk space is being used.

Architecture Overview

[dust /path]
        |
   [Recursive Directory Scanner]
   Walk filesystem tree
   Calculate sizes
        |
   [Sort by Size]
   Largest entries at bottom
        |
   [Visual Output]
   Tree structure with:
   - Color-coded bars
   - Proportional widths
   - Human-readable sizes
   - File count per dir

   Example output:
   1.2G   ┌── node_modules
   340M   │ ┌── .git
   2.1G   ├── project-a
   800M   ├── project-b
   4.5G ┌─┴ /home/user/code

Self-Hosting & Configuration

# Common usage patterns

# Quick overview of home directory
dust ~

# Find space hogs in /var
sudo dust /var -n 15

# Show only directories (skip individual files)
dust -d

# Ignore specific directories
dust -X node_modules -X .git

# Show file count alongside size
dust -f

# Minimum size threshold
dust -z 100M  # only show items > 100MB

# Show percentage instead of bars
dust -p

# Combine with other tools
dust ~ -n 20 | head -25  # pipe-friendly

Key Features

• Visual Tree — color-coded proportional bars show relative sizes
• Instant Results — no interactive mode, just run and see
• Smart Defaults — shows the most useful view without flags
• Ignore Patterns — skip directories like node_modules or .git
• File Count — optionally show number of files per directory
• Apparent Size — show actual content size vs disk allocation
• Cross-Platform — Linux, macOS, and Windows
• Fast — Rust-powered parallel directory traversal

Comparison with Similar Tools

FAQ

Q: dust vs ncdu — when should I use which? A: dust for a quick visual overview (one command, instant answer). ncdu when you need to interactively navigate and delete files.

Q: How do I exclude directories? A: Use -X flag: "dust -X node_modules -X .git -X target". Multiple -X flags for multiple exclusions.

Q: Can dust show hidden files? A: Yes, dust shows hidden files by default. Use -i to ignore hidden files if needed.

Q: Why is my total different from df? A: dust shows file sizes (apparent or allocated). df shows filesystem-level usage including metadata, journals, and reserved space. Use "dust -s" for apparent sizes.

Sources

• GitHub: https://github.com/bootandy/dust
• Created by Andy Boot
• License: Apache-2.0