Overview

The QDirStat project proudly presents its latest release: QDirStat 1.4.

This release brings a number of new features as well as some bug fixes:

• File size statistics window with histogram

• Filling the gaps in the treemap (directories with lots of small files)

• Checked code with Coverity and fixed all issues it pointed out

• Improved support for file and directory names with UTF-8 special characters (Qt 4 only issue)

• Improved support for directories that have read, but not execute permissions

Details

New Features

File Size Statistics Window with Histogram

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 there are explanations of those things 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.

There is also a GitHub issue to discuss this; comments are welcome. Feel free to reopen this for any discussions about that topic.

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 there were some experiments 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.

The next approach was using gradients. The first impression was good, but then it turned out 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 giving that up did not seem like a smart idea. After playing a bit with the gradient parameters (toning it down and giving it just a little blueish tint) this was the result:

This appears to be 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...).

Bugfixes

• 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).

• 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!

Other Improvements

• 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.

• 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.