My ongoing quest for modern text-mode utilities has brought another discovery: gdu, found at https://github.com/dundee/gdu. It’s an interactive text-mode disk usage analyser written with GoLang.

gdu is very fast and simple in use. It allows interactive walking through directories and instant deleting of obsolete files and directories. It’s quite similar to ncdu but seems much faster. It also has one major additional feature - ability to view file content.

It’s easy to install with the package manager of your choice: brew, apt, snap etc. or simply straight from sources using go install

go install github.com/dundee/gdu@latest

On go versions older than 1.17 use the older, now deprecated go get:

go get -u github.com/dundee/gdu/v5/cmd/gdu

Obviously this is nothing that you couldn’t already do with combination of du, rm, cat and cd ;-) But it’s much simpler, faster and easier. I know, I know… bearded admins who dream in bash will strongly disagree, but forgive me, I haven’t grown my beard yet ;-)

Have a great week with terminal!