Overview

The QDirStat project proudly presents its latest release: QDirStat 1.7.1.

This is a stable release. It brings a number new features and a bug fix:

• Added a "Discover" toplevel menu with actions to easily find

  • the largest files
  • the newest files
  • the oldest files
  • files with multiple hard links
  • broken symbolic links
  • sparse files

• Now showing the target of symbolic links in the details panel. If the target does not exist, a Broken Link warning is also shown.

• Menu reorganization. The new toplevel menus are now:

  File, Edit, View, Go To, Discover, Clean up, Help

• Enabled Refresh Selected now for files as well. In that case, the parent directory is refreshed.

• Added hotkey [F6] for Refresh Selected.

• Now ignoring the loopback mounts of installed snap packages in the "Open Directory" dialog and in the "Mounted Filesystems" window.

• Added links to external documents to a new "Problems and Solutions" submenu of the "Help" menu so they are more easily discoverable.

• Added a document about finding files that are shadowed by a mount and a script for the most common case.

• Bug fix: Fixed GitHub Issue #149:

  Segfault when using a cleanup action with refresh policy AssumeDeleted after a cleanup action with RefreshParent in the same directory.

Details

"Discover" Actions

Added a "Discover" toplevel menu with actions to easily find

• the largest files
• the newest files
• the oldest files
• files with multiple hard links
• broken symbolic links
• sparse files

in the whole displayed directory tree or, if a directory is selected, in that subtree.

In each case, a non-modal dialog is opened with a list of the results. Clicking on one of them selects it in the main window where you can see more details and use cleanup actions.

Most of that was already there in some way or the other, but now it's easier to discover (pun intended) and to use.

Finding large files is of course what the treemap is primarily for; just spot large blobs and click on them to find out what they are and where they are hiding.

Finding the newest files can also be done by sorting the tree by the "last modified" column and then opening the topmost branches. This is often useful to find out where some browser dumped that last download.

Similarly, to find the oldest files, enable the "oldest files" tree column, sort by that and open branches until you can see a file.

Files with multiple hard links or sparse files were mentioned in the log; otherwise they were not so easy to find (short of using the command line, of course).

Symlinks in the Details Panel

Now showing the target of symbolic links in the details panel.

If it's a short path, the whole path is shown; otherwise without the path (".../somewhere"), and the full path is shown as a pop-up upon mouse click.

If the target does not exist, a Broken Link warning is also shown.

Menu Reorganization

The menus had become a little too crowded, especially on the top level.

• The new toplevel menus are now:

  • File
  • Edit
  • View
  • Go To
  • Discover
  • Clean up
  • Help

  I.e. it's down to 7 items which is generally regarded as the gold standard by usability experts.

• The former "Settings" menu is gone; "Configure QDirStat" is now in the "Edit" menu. There was only that one action in the "Settings" menu, and that is quite wasteful in terms of screen space and toplevel menu complexity.

• Moved out some options entirely from the menus; they are still available when editing the config file manually:

  • "Show current path"
  • "Treemap as side panel"

• "Expand tree level" is now limited to level 5 (formerly 9). Opening that many tree branches means a huge performance drop anyway.

• The former "Treemap" menu is now a submenu of "View". Most of those actions are available as tool bar buttons and mouse wheel operations anyway.

Documentation

• Added links to external documents to a new "Problems and Solutions" submenu of the "Help" menu so they are more easily discoverable.

• Added a document about finding files that are shadowed by a mount and a script for the most common case.

Handling Loopback Mounts

Now ignoring the loopback mounts of installed snap packages in the "Open Directory" dialog and in the "Mounted Filesystems" window.

Yes, each of them has a separate loop mount, even if it's only installed, not in active use. Those mounts clutter the output of commands like df or mount with nonsensical cruft:

df -hT | grep snap

/dev/loop0  squashfs  159M  159M  0 100% /snap/chromium/1244
/dev/loop1  squashfs   55M   55M  0 100% /snap/core18/1880
/dev/loop2  squashfs   63M   63M  0 100% /snap/gtk-common-themes/1506
/dev/loop3  squashfs   30M   30M  0 100% /snap/snapd/8542

(From a freshly installed Xubuntu 20.04 LTS)

Misc

• Enabled Refresh Selected now for files as well. In that case, the parent directory is refreshed.

• Added hotkey [F6] for Refresh Selected.

  [F5] is still Refresh All like in all web browsers. Since window managers / desktop environments tend to consume [F5] with modifier keys ([Shift] [F5], [Alt] [F5], [Ctrl] [F5]), this is the closest we can get, and it's more consistent than using something like [Ctrl] [R].

  This was inspired by the discussion in PR#145.

Bug Fix

Fixed GitHub Issue #149:

Segfault when using a cleanup action with refresh policy AssumeDeleted after a cleanup action with RefreshParent in the same directory.