TL;DR — Quick Summary

Dust (du + Rust) shows disk usage with an intuitive visual bar chart in the terminal. A modern replacement for du that makes finding large files and directories instant.

Dust makes finding disk space hogs instant. Instead of squinting at du -sh * | sort -h, Dust shows proportional bar charts with colors — the biggest directories are immediately obvious.

Installation

# macOS
brew install dust

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S dust

# Cargo
cargo install du-dust

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install du-dust

# Verify
dust --version

Usage

# Scan current directory
dust

# Scan specific path
dust /home

# Limit depth
dust -d 2 /var

# Show files instead of directories
dust -f

# Top N largest
dust -n 20

# Ignore hidden files
dust -i

# Show apparent size (not disk blocks)
dust -s

# Reverse order (smallest first)
dust -r

# Only show items larger than threshold
dust -z 100M

Example Output

  6.4G ┌── node_modules │████████████████████████████████████│ 45%
  3.2G ├── .git         │██████████████████                  │ 22%
  2.1G ├── dist         │████████████                        │ 15%
  1.4G ├── src          │████████                            │ 10%
  800M ├── public       │████                                │  6%
  200M ├── tests        │█                                   │  1%
 14.1G   /project

Comparison

FeatureDustduncdugdu
LanguageRustCCGo
Visual barsYesNoYesYes
InteractiveNoNoYesYes
SpeedFastFastModerateFast
.gitignoreYesNoNoNo
Cross-platformYesUnixUnixYes

Summary

  • Dust shows disk usage with proportional bar charts for instant visualization
  • Sorted by size — largest directories and files appear first
  • Use -f for files, -d N for depth, -n N for top N results
  • Respects .gitignore for cleaner results in project directories
  • Non-interactive tool for quick scans; use ncdu for interactive cleanup