I’ve been down that road many times: “What folder takes up the most disk space”. Over the time lots of junk accumulates on one’s disk. So far the following one-liner has been a trusty companion:

Some other tools are available of which I don’t remember the names. But why not use something that integrates well with Konqueror in KDE? Like “FSView” (short for file-size view)? Well, for one thing it’s painfully slow, and what makes things worse it’s utterly unreadble. But what I figured out this afternoon, is that the app actually offers some quite nice settings. The buty of Konqueror integration is that the “plugins” can insert thei own menu-items wherever they like. Which is nice, because they then integrate well with already existing menu options. But on the other hand, if you are used to open menu paths like “Plugins -> MyPlugin -> Settings” or “Edit/Tools -> Options -> Plugins” you won’t find them.

In the case of fs-view, the options are neatly tucked away in the “View” menu. Which actually makes perfect sense. But working too much on Windows-inspired user interfaces twisted my mind too much and I go looking into the non-obvious places out of pure habit 😉

Now, to spice up fsview a bit I made the following changes:

• In the “Visualisation” sub-menu:
  • Set “Nesting” to “Vertical”
  • Set “Border” Width to 3
  • Disabled both options “Enable Rotation” and “Shading”
• In the “Stop at Area” sub-menu:
  • Set value to “400”
• In the “Stop at Depth” sub-menu:
  • Set value to “2”

Both “Stop at …” settings limit the number of times fs-view has to redraw/rearrange the grid. This should speed things up and it becomes more readable. The end result looks something like this:

FSView with customizations

In any case, running fs-view on folders with a large number of files can be very slow and make konqueror even unresponsive while it’s running. Be patient. In my opinion, if you want to determine the biggest file/folder as quickly as possible, the “du -s” method (as outlined above) is preferrable.