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# QDirStat Development History

This is more verbose than a traditional change log, thus the unusual name of
this file.

See the README.md file for the latest news:

https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/README.md

## QDirStat History

- 2022-06-28

- A middle click in the treemap now toggles the highlight of that tile's
parent and ancestors on or off. Previously, it always kept the highlight,
and you had to click outside the highlighted area to get rid of the
highlight again.

- Added packed Git archives ("pack-*.pack") to the "Compressed Archives" MIME
category, i.e., they appear now in green in the treemap, no longer in the
"I don't know what that thing is" grey.

- No longer drawing additional lines in the treemap by default if there is
low contrast between individual treemap tiles; that only makes the treemap
display uglier for little benefit. You can still switch it on with the
`EnforceContrast` setting in the config file
(`~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf`).

- 2022-05-31

- Bug fix for the "Packages" view for .deb / APT based systems: Now also list
packages that are on hold. They were previously missing.

- 2022-05-30

- Improved BSD support ([GitHub issue #195](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/195)):
If neither `/proc/mounts` nor `/etc/mtab` is available, fall back to using
`QStorageInfo` (if available; Qt 5.4 or later).

This returns a little less complete information; for example, only
rudimentary mount options which are used for some special cases.

- 2022-05-19

- Now using `xdg-open %d` in KDE Plasma for the "Open File Manager Here"
standard cleanup action. This may help for
[GitHub issue #192](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/192),
yet still maintain the ability to use a powerful file manager like
_Konqueror_ (if that is configured), falling back to the standard _Dolphin_.

- 2022-03-08

- Fixed [GitHub issue #190](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/190):
MIME categories for overlapping suffixes

Files with multiple suffixes like `.tar.gz` were wrongly sorted into the
same MIME category as `.gz`. It did find the category for the longer one
(`.tar.gz`), but then it continued looking, resulting in the shortest
matching one (`.gz`). Now stopping at the longest hit.

- 2022-02-25

- Prevent a hanging Samba (CIFS) or NFS mount from blocking the program, even
when no information from that mount is needed at all:

If you started QDirStat with a path on the command line, it collected the
information about used / free / reserved disk space for all mounted
filesytems already. If you had a network mount that didn't respond, you
still had to wait for a timeout before the program could continue.

Now it collects that information only when it's really needed:

- In the "Open Directory" dialog where it displays those sizes in the
"Places and Mounted Filesystems" bar on the left

- In the "Mounted Filesystems" (`du`-like) window (Menu "View" -> "Show
Mounted Filesystems").

- 2022-01-04

- Now cutting off insanely long generated device names of LUKS devices in the
"Mounted Filesystems" window: E.g. `/dev/mapper/luks-3fae43...` instead of
`/dev/mapper/luks-3fae4328-4294-4c77-8f98-d437c41da26c`. The long name is
displayed in a tooltip.

- 2021-12-30

- Don't show inactive (unmounted) mounts managed by the automounter anymore
in the "Places and Mounted Filesystems" bar of the "Open Directory"
dialog.

Notice that those directories are still accessible from the tree at the
right side, but they no longer take a prominent place in the left bar.

- 2021-12-12

- Fixed [GitHub issue #184](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/184):
When reading a cache file, sparse files were displayed as "allocated: 0 Bytes".

About QDirStat cache files:
- [qdirstat-cache-writer documentation](scripts/README.md)
- [QDirStat for Servers](doc/QDirStat-for-Servers.md)

- 2021-09-28

- Merged the changes for
[GitHub issue #176](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/176)
to _master_:

In the treemap, a middle click now also behaves like a left click
(including `Ctrl`+click); but it also displays white frames indicating the
parent directories of that item, and everything that does not belong to
that directory branch is covered by a transparent overlay.

See [GitHub issue #181](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/181)
for a screenshot and more details.

- 2021-08-28 **New stable release: 1.8**

**Summary:**

- New view: _File Age Statistics_

- Navigation history like in a web browser (_Back_, _Forward_)

- Bug fixes

- Some small improvements

**Details:**

- New view: _File Age Statistics_

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-file-age-years.png" width="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-file-age-years.png)
[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-file-age-months.png" width="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-file-age-months.png)
[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-file-age-long-ago.png" width="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-file-age-long-ago.png)

This shows the number of files per year and/or per month that were last
modified in that year or month, together with the total size of those files
and a percent bar for both (number and total size).

- New documentation for that view: [File Age Statistics](doc/File-Age-Stats.md)

- Navigation history for directories like in a web browser:

- New buttons _Back_ / _Forward_ in the tool bar

- Standard keyboard shortcuts `[Alt] [Cursor Left]` /
`[Alt] [Cursor Right]` like in all common web browsers

- Support for _Back_ / _Forward_ mouse buttons if the mouse has them

- History menu on those buttons (long press on the buttons) for the last 16
directories

- Internal restructuring and refactoring to keep the code maintainable

- Bug fixes:

- Fixed [GitHub issue #169](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/169):
Shorten path components in the breadcrumb widget for insanely long paths.

- Now closing a left-over _Permissions error_ panel when refreshing from disk.
After the re-read, the permissions error may no longer be there.

- Small improvements:

- In the _Mounted Filesystems_ window, don't show inactive mounts managed
by the automounter anymore.

- In the _Open Directory_ window, automatically open the first directory
level if a path was clicked in the _Places_ list on the left, and scroll
the tree on the right so that path is at the top.

- Added a little margin to the left in the main window's tree view for the
_Size_ column so it looks now less cramped.

- 2021-08-06

- Lots of internal restructuring and refactoring to keep the code
maintainable: In particular, the MainWindow code was getting out of hand
with more and more features and menu actions being added all the time, so
some of that was moved out to separate classes.

That involved quite some testing and rethinking how certain parts are
working, which in turn involved some head-scratching, rearranging code had
the byproduct of more internal documentation and also some small bug fixes.

- The "Permissions error" panel message didn't always go away when the user
had simply left it open and just opened a new directory; and probably also
in some other situations. Now it's always cleanly removed whenever a new
directory tree is read or when it's re-read ("Refresh all" or "Refresh
Selected"). That was one of those small bug fixes.

- 2021-07-31

- Now the "File Age Statistics" window also shows statistics for the months
of this and the last year as collapsible (and by default collapsed) items
in the same list, so you can break down the age of files further for the
last 13-24 months. If a month entry is selected in that list, locating the
files of course only locates the files that were last modified within that
month.

More details and more screenshots at [GitHub issue #172](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/172).

- 2021-07-29

- Added a "Back" and a "Forward" button to move back and forth in the history
of visited directories; i.e. QDirStat behaves now very much like a web
browser when navigating the filesystem.

It also has a history menu when you long-press the "Back" or "Forward"
buttons, and of course it uses the same keyboard shortcuts `[Alt] [Cursor
Left]` and `[Alt] [Cursor Right]` that all common web browsers use.

- 2021-07-28

- Added a "Locate" button to the new _File Age Statistics_ view, using the
same window as the actions from the "Discover" menu.

This is enabled if there are no more than 1000 files in the currently
selected year to avoid the results list to become too long and too
unwieldy. If there are more than 1000 files in the currently selected year,
break it down to another subdirectory first; otherwise you'd be ending up
with the better part of the whole filesystem in the results list in the
extreme case.

- 2021-07-27

- Added a whole new type of view: _File Age Statistics_, displaying file
modification times by years, so you can see during what time frame there
was any activity in a directory tree:

[<img width="700" src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/11538225/127198386-215ecc9a-325c-4954-afef-e1d7f271c013.png">](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/11538225/127198386-215ecc9a-325c-4954-afef-e1d7f271c013.png)

More details and a lot more screenshots at [GitHub issue #172](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/172).

- 2021-07-02

- Don't show inactive (unmounted) mounts managed by the automounter anymore
in the "Mounted Filesystems" window. They were listed there as filesystem
type "autofs" and 0 bytes total size which was not very useful.

Once they become auto-mounted by a user accessing them in the filesystem,
they are shown there normally, of course.

- 2021-06-26

- Improved the fix for [GitHub issue #169](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/169):
Breadcrumbs navigator becomes too wide for very long paths.

Now no longer aggressively shortening all path components in the
breadcrumbs navigator when the complete path becomes even just a little bit
too long, but concentrating on the longest parts and shortening them one by
one until the complete path is not too long anymore.

- 2021-06-24

- First (crude) fix for [GitHub issue #169](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/169):
Breadcrumbs navigator becomes too wide for very long paths.
Now shortening path components if the overall path would become too wide.
Right now it shortens them a bit too aggressively.

- 2021-06-21 [QDirStat AppImage and why I don't like it](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/168)

TL;DR:
- It's big and fat (113 MB)
- It's an outdated version (QDirStat 1.6.1 from 16 months ago)
- It doesn't even tell you what version it contains
- It still needs a fairly recent version of GLibc, so you can't run it on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
- It's unclear if at least the libraries inside (e.g. the Qt libs) are up to date

------------

- 2021-04-05 **New stable release: 1.7.1**

**Summary:**

- 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](doc/Shadowed-by-Mount.md)
and a script for the most common case.

- Bug fix: Fixed [GitHub Issue #149](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/149):

Segfault when using a cleanup action with refresh policy _AssumeDeleted_
after a cleanup action with _RefreshParent_ in the same directory.

**Details:**

- 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.

[<img width="750" src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-discover.png">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-discover.png)

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).

- 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: They 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.

- 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](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/pull/145).

- 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)

- 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](doc/Shadowed-by-Mount.md)
and a script for the most common case.

- Bug fix: Fixed [GitHub Issue #149](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/149):

Segfault when using a cleanup action with refresh policy _AssumeDeleted_
after a cleanup action with _RefreshParent_ in the same directory.

----------

- 2021-03-24

- New document about [finding files that are shadowed by a mount](doc/Shadowed-by-Mount.md)

- New script for finding files on the root filesystem that are shadowed by a
mount (see doc link above).

- 2021-03-19

- Added a context menu to the "Locate Files" window (the "Discover" results)
with the cleanup actions that are applicable to files.

- Keyboard shortcuts for cleanups now also work in the "Locate Files" window.

- 2020-12-21

- Fixed [GitHub Issue #149](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/149):
Segfault when using a cleanup action with refresh policy _AssumeDeleted_ after
a cleanup action with _RefreshParent_ in the same directory.

- 2020-11-23

- Menu reorganization: They had become a little too crowded, especially on
the top level.

- Moved out some options 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.

I experimented shortly with moving some more settings there, e.g. "Show
details panel" and "Show tremap", but I reverted that: The details panel
is different for each layout (L1, L2, L3), and the layout switching
actions are in the "View" menu where they belong; so "Show details panel"
should really remain near them. And not having "Show treemap" in the
"Treemap" submenu would be very confusing.

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.

I am not completely happy yet with how additional views are scattered among
several menus:

- "File" -> "Show installed packages"
- "File" -> "Show unpackaged files"
- "View" -> "File size statistics"
- "View" -> "File type statistics"
- "View" -> "Show mounted filesystems"

The rationale is that those views in the "File" menu load completely new
content, replacing the scanned directory in both the tree view and the
treemap; thus they are on a similar level as "Open directory", so they are
right next to that action.

The other views open in separate windows, so they are add-on views to the
currently loaded directory tree.

- 2020-11-22

- Added a "Discover" toplevel menu 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.

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).

- 2020-10-23

- 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.

- 2020-10-15

- Enabled _Refresh Selected_ now for files as well. In that case, the parent
directory is refreshed.

- Added hotkey `[F6]` for _Refresh Selected_.

This was inspired by the discussion in [PR#145](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/pull/145).

- 2020-08-03

- 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

```

(From a freshly installed Xubuntu 20.04 LTS)

Thanks a lot. Time to extend my `df` shell alias to exclude filesystem type
"squashfs", too:

```
alias df='/bin/df -x tmpfs -x devtmpfs -x squashfs -h $*'
```

------------

- 2020-07-26 **New stable release: 1.7**

**Summary:**

- Closing the gap between sizes reported by QDirstat and sizes reported by
the `du` command: Now also taking the allocated size into account.

- Now also displaying the allocated size where it makes sense.

- New "Mounted Filesystems" window showing output similar to the `df` command
(but without the cruft).

- New directory selection dialog showing all (real) filesystems.

- New checkbox to cross filesystems (temporarily) in the directory selection
dialog.

- Workaround for NTFS oddities: Ignoring hard links on NTFS.

- Added config option to ignore hard links in general.

- Added a document about Btrfs free size and how different tools tend to show
different values: [Btrfs-Free-Size.md](doc/Btrfs-Free-Size.md)

- Bug fixes

**Details:**

- Closing the gap between sizes reported by QDirstat and sizes reported by
the `du` command: Now also taking the allocated size into account.

There were repeated threads on various social media where users wondered
why QDirStat displayed different sizes than the `du` or the `df` commands,
sometimes slightly different, sometimes off by quite a lot.

In short, this is mostly due to the difference between a file's _byte size_
and its _allocated blocks_: On most filesystem types, a file of 49 bytes
still consumes a minimum of 4 KB (4096 bytes); disk space is allocated in
_clusters_ (typically 4 KB), not byte by byte. On a typical Linux root
filesystem with many thousands of tiny files, this difference can add up to
a lot.

Formerly, QDirStat only added up the _byte sizes_, disregarding the
allocated, but really unused part at the end of tiny files. The rationale
was that some filesystem types handle that in more intelligent ways, yet
there is no documented way to get information from a filesystem if it
actually does that. It turned out that in reality, most of them don't
bother; they simply let most of that last cluster go to waste.

Now QDirStat displays _both_ sizes where useful:

[<img width="845" src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-tiny-files.png">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-tiny-files.png)

- For tiny files, the tree view now shows both sizes: "49 B (4k)"

- For directories, the tree view now shows the total of the _allocated_
sizes. This may sound a bit inconsistent, but it feels very natural and
intuitive: You are typically interested in how much disk space the
subtree consumes, no matter if some part of that is really wasted.

- The _details_ view shows both sizes when there is a difference (in the
displayed numeric precision): "Size: 42.1 MB" vs. "Allocated: 42.2 MB",
but not "Size: 42.0 MB" vs. "Allocated: 42.0 MB".

- Treemap tiles now correspond to a file's _allocated_ size. This makes a
real difference for tiny files.

More details at [GitHub Issue #134](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/134):
_Size Difference between QDirStat Reports and the "du" and "df" Commands_.

- New "Mounted Filesystems" window ("View" -> "Show Mounted Filesystems" or
Ctrl-M):

[<img width="611" src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-filesystems-window.png">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-filesystems-window.png)

This shows information about "normal" mounted filesystems (excluding system
mounts like `/dev`, `/proc`, `/sys`, bind mounts, Btrfs subvolumes) with
usage data as reported by the filesystem itself. The "Reserved" column
shows the disk space reserved for the root user on that filesystem, "Free"
is the available space for non-privileged users.

Sometimes the "Used" size reported here may be different from what QDirStat
reports after reading that complete filesystem; this can be due to
metadata, journals or snapshots. Notice that in those cases, the `du`
command will also display a different value than the `df` command.

- QDirStat now has its own custom directory selection dialog; it no longer
uses one of the simplistic Qt standard file dialogs:

[<img width="498" src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-open-dir-dialog.png">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-open-dir-dialog.png)

The "Places" bar on the left shows your home directory and all "real"
filesystems (the same as in the new "Mounted Filesystems" window). For each
filesystem, it shows

- The mount point
- The total size of the filesystem
- The filesystem type ("ext4", "btrfs", "ntfs", ...)
- The device name ("/dev/sda2") (in a tooltip)

In the "Path" combo box you can simply edit the path or copy and paste it
from another window. Use the "Up" button to move one directory level up.

- The "Cross Filesystems" checkbox lets you temporarily override the global
configuration option of the same name: QDirStat will then no longer stop
when a mount point is found during reading a subtree, it will descend into
that mounted filesystem and read it, too; but again, only for "real"
filesystems, not for system mounts such as `/dev`, `/sys`, `/proc`, not for
bind mounts, not for filesystems mounted multiple times, and not for
network mounts (NFS, Samba / CIFS).

More details at [GitHub Issue #129](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/129).

- Added a workaround for wrong size sums on NTFS: Now disregarding hard links
on NTFS.

The (current?) _ntfs-3g_ implementation using _fuseblk_ seems to disagree
with Windows tools which files really have hard links.

It appears that _ntfs-3g_ regards even the MS-DOS compatible short filename
(`PROGRA~2` vs. `Program Files`) as a hard link which is of course utter
nonsense; that means that almost all files on an NTFS partition are
reported as having multiple hard links, so QDirStat displayed them as
having only half their real size.

Notice that this is a bug in _ntfs-3g_, not in QDirStat.

See also [GitHub Issue #88](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/88).

- <summary>
Added a config option to ignore hard links.
</summary>

This is useful for a very small number of use cases. Hard links are not
very common anymore in today's Linux / BSD / Unix-like systems, so most
users won't have to bother with this at all.

By default, QDirStat sums up the disk space for a file with multiple hard
links for each hard link's share of the overall size: If a file with 1 MB
has 4 hard links, for each of those 4 links QDirStat adds 1/4 of the size
(i.e., 256 kB) to the parent directory. If all those 4 links are in the
same directory, that's very simple: They add up to 4 * 256 kB = 1 MB, so
the sum is correct.

If those hard links are all in different directories, each directory only
gets part of that disk space allocated, because in fact they share the disk
space among each other; the total disk space sum taking all those
directories into account is still correct, of course.

The trouble starts when you want to make a backup of only one of those
directories: Even though the disk space is still shared with other
directories, on the backup medium, you still need the disk space for that
complete file, i.e. the full 1 MB, not only that directory's share (256
kB). With a lot of hard-linked files, that can add up to a lot of
difference between what QDirStat displays and what disk space you actually
need for the backup.

There was a user who makes heavy use of that, and for that kind of use case
there is now the option to ignore hard links: In that case, QDirStat sums
up the complete size (the full 1 MB) for each hard link of the file.

While that is useful for this special case, and you can now see the total
size that you will need for your backup medium for that one directory, the
total size higher up in the directory tree where more than one of those
directories that share hard linked files with each other is off: That file
now appears 4 times with 1 MB each, so it will add up to 4 MB.

There is now a new config option in `~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf`:

```ini
[DirectoryTree]
...
IgnoreHardLinks=false
```

This is intentionally not available in the GUI config dialog to avoid
confusion; use a text editor (while QDirStat is not running) to change
this setting.

Please use that config option only when you are aware of the consequences;
this is a specialized option for rare, specialized use cases. It basically
makes sense only if the other hard links are all outside the subtree that
QDirStat displays.

More details at [GitHub Issue #124](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/124).
</details>

- There is now a new document about Btrfs free size and how different tools
tend to show different values: [Btrfs-Free-Size.md](doc/Btrfs-Free-Size.md)

Whenever users run out of disk space on Btrfs (which happens a lot, mostly
because of snapshots) and they try to figure out where all their disk space
went, they are confused about different tools reporting totally different
and inconsistent sizes; traditional Linux / Unix command line tools like
`du` and `df` just like GUI tools like QDirStat. Hopefully, this document
will shed some light on that.

**Bug Fixes:**

- Fixed the internal cache writer (the one called from the _File_ menu, not
the _qdirstat-cache-writer_ Perl script): For files with multiple hard
links, it wrote the wrong size to the cache file: The result of _size /
links_, not _size_.

This was part of [GitHub Issue #124](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/124).

- Fixed crash when terminating with Ctrl-Q while reading directories
[(GitHub Issue #122)](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/122).

- Now automatically reopening the old current branch in the tree view when
using actions like "refresh selected" and "continue reading at mount point
([GitHub Issue #135](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/135)).

- Not a bug, but a minor new feature: Now automatically expanding the first
directory level of a mount point after "continue reading at mount point".

- Now correctly labelling a mount point as mount point in the "Details"
panel.

------------------

- 2020-06-14

- Now displaying the allocated size for very small files (8 kB (2 clusters)
or less) in a much more subdued way so it's still there, but less
distracting.

- If a file is wasting very much space (i.e. if it uses 33% or less of its
allocated disk space), now displaying the allocated size in bold in the
"Details" panel to draw more attention to the fact. This affects pretty
much all tiny files with 1360 bytes or less since the cluster size of most
(all?) Linux filesystem is so large (4 kB for ext4, XFS, Btrfs).

Screenshot for both changes at [GitHub Issue #134](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/134).

- 2020-06-13

- Now automatically expanding the first directory level of a mount point
after "continue reading at mount point".

- Now correctly labelling a mount point as mount point in the "Details"
panel.

- 2020-06-12

- NTFS is now detected as "ntfs", no longer as "fuseblk" in the "Open
Directory" and the "Filesystems" dialogs.

This was fallout of
[GitHub Issue #88](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/88)
(NTFS hard links).

- Now ignoring hard links on NTFS; the (current?) ntfs-3g implementation
using fuseblk seems to disagree with Windows tools which files really have
hard links. And in this case I tend to have more faith in the Windows
tools. Now the total sizes of my Windows partitions as reported by QDirStat
are much closer to the sizes reported by the `df` command, the `statfs()`
system call and QDirStat's new "Filesystems" window.

See also [GitHub Issue #88](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/88).

- 2020-06-11

- Fixed [GitHub Issue #134](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/134):
_Size Difference between QDirStat Reports and the "du" and "df" Commands_:

- Now also showing the _allocated_ size in the details panel for files and
directory trees. This can make a a big difference if there are lots of tiny files.

- Now showing the _allocated_ size for directories in the tree view, not
only the sum of all the _byte_ sizes of all the files in the subtree.

- Now using the _allocated_ size in the treemap so tiny files appear with
their true size, no longer disappearing in the grey background: A 6 bytes
file is now displayed with the 4 KB that it actually consumes, not just
the 6 bytes of its content.

More information and lots of screenshots at
[GitHub Issue #134](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/134).

- 2020-06-03

- New "Mounted Filesystems" window ("View" -> "Show Mounted Filesystems" or
Ctrl-M):

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-filesystems-window.png">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-filesystems-window.png)

This shows information about "normal" mounted filesystems (excluding system
mounts like /dev, /proc, /sys, bind mounts, Btrfs subvolumes) with usage
data as reported by the filesystem itself. The "Reserved" column shows the
disk space reserved for the root user on that filesystem, "Free" is the
available space for non-privileged users.

Sometimes the "Used" size reported here may be quite different from what
QDirStat reports after reading that complete filesystem; this can be due to
metadata, journals or snapshots.

- Added a document about Btrfs free size and how different tools tend to show
different values: [Btrfs-Free-Size.md](doc/Btrfs-Free-Size.md)

- 2020-05-27

- Implemented [GitHub Issue #129](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/129):
_Option to continue reading at all mount points at once_.

Previously, you could choose to either always cross filesystems while
reading directories, or you could later open the parent branch of the mount
point in the tree view and then use "Continue reading at mount point" from
the main menu / context menu.

Now you can change this setting temporarily for the current program run; it
will continue reading at "normal" mount points, i.e. excluding system
mounts like `/dev`, `/proc`, `/sys` and also bind mounts or network mounts; but
it still reads Btrfs subvolumes.

- This new option needed a check box in the "Open Directory" dialog; so from
now on, QDirStat no longer uses the generic Qt file dialog, it has a custom
one:

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-open-dir-dialog.png">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-open-dir-dialog.png)

In addition to that new check box at the bottom, there is now also a new
"places" widget for quick access to the user's home directory and all
("normal", see above) mounted filesystems, including network mounts (NFS,
Samba / Cifs).

- 2020-03-19

- Added a config option to ignore hard links.

This is useful for a very small number of use cases. Hard links are not
very common anymore in today's Linux / BSD / Unix-like systems, so most
users won't have to bother with this at all.

So please use that config option only when you are aware of the
consequences; this is a specialized option for rare, specialized use
cases. It basically makes sense only if the other hard links are all
outside the subtree that QDirStat displays.

If in doubt, leave this option off (which is the default).

More details at [GitHub Issue #124](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/124).

- 2020-03-06

This was part of [GitHub Issue #124](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/124).

- 2020-02-24

- Fixed crash when terminating with Ctrl-Q while reading directories
[(GitHub Issue #122)](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/122).

--------------

- 2020-02-13 **New stable release: 1.6.1**

**Summary:**

- Much better handling for "permission denied" errors while reading directories

- Now showing the exact byte size (134 495 994 Bytes instead of 128.3 MB)
upon mouse click in the tree (right click) and in the details panel (left
or right click)

- New optional tree column "Oldest File" (not enabled by default)

- Bug fix: Support for dark widget themes in file size histogram window

**Details:**

- If you start QDirStat with insufficient permissions, you could easily
overlook large subtrees in the filesystem that consume disk space, but were
not visible to you. They did get a special icon, but you would have to open
the parent directory in the tree view to see that.

Now, QDirStat notifies you in several ways:

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-err-dirs-light.png" height="300">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-err-dirs-light.png)

- All parent directories that contain a subtree that could not be read are
now displayed in dark red in the tree view.

- The _Size_ field of those directories as well as other accumulated values
(_Items_, _Files_, _Subdirs_) are now preceded with a "greater than" sign
to indicate that there is most likely more, but that information could
not be retrieved: ">7.2 MB" indicating that it's at least 7.2 MB and most
likely more than that, but we don't know because one or more
subdirectories could not be read.

- A message panel in the main window between the tree view and the treemap
with a message that some directories could not be read.

You can close the message with the `[x]` close button on its right side,
but you can also simply leave it open. This is a lot less obtrusive than
a pop-up dialog, yet less temporary than a message in the bottom status
line that will disappear in a few seconds or when anything else is
reported.

- Clicking on the "Details..." link in that message opens a separate window
to report all directories that could not be read (typically because of
insufficient permissions).

This window is non-modal, i.e. you can still interact with the main
window when it is open. Click on any directory that it lists to locate it
in the main window: The tree view will open that branch and scroll to
make it visible.

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-unreadable-dirs-window.png" height="300">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-unreadable-dirs-window.png)

- In addition to the "locked folder" icon, unreadable directories are shown
in bright red in the tree view.

- When an unreadable directory is selected in the tree view, the details
panel now shows a large padlock icon and a message "[Permission Denied]",
and the permissions are highlighted in red.

- You can now see the exact size in bytes both in the tree view and in the
details panel: 134 495 994 Bytes instead of 128.3 MB. The field is still
(somewhat) human readable with thousands separators (using blanks to avoid
confusion with different decimal / thousands separators in different
languages).

This can make it easier to compare sizes with other tools that report them
in bytes or that insist in using 1000-based units (QDirStat uses 1024-based
size units: 1 kB = 1024 Bytes; 1 MB = 1024 kB; 1 GB = 1024 MB; etc.).

Not using tool tips that appear automatically was a conscious decision:
This level of detailed information is not needed that often, and tool tips
get in the way whenever the mouse cursor lingers too long at an active
spot. More often than not a tool tip obscurs other content that the user
might want to read at that very moment. This is why in QDirStat in the rare
cases that you are interested in those exact numbers, you have to click:

- In the tree view, right-click a size field (a left click is used for
selecting an item in tree views, so the context menu is pressed into
service for that purpose (only for the size column)).

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-byte-size.png" height="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-byte-size.png)

- In the details panel, use left or right click. To indicate what fields
can be clicked, they are now underlined when the mouse hovers over them.

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-byte-size-2a.png" height="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-byte-size-2a.png)

_Hovering over fields that can be clicked shows them underlined, very
much like a hyperlink._

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-byte-size-2b.png" height="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-byte-size-2b.png)

_Clicking (left or right mouse button) shows more details: In this case,
the exact byte size._

- There is now an optional new column "Oldest File" that shows the timestamp
(the mtime) of the oldest file in a subtree. This is strictly about files;
directories, symlinks and special files (block or character devices, FIFOs
etc.) are ignored for this.

This may be useful to spot some old cruft, for example leftover dot files
in your home directory. Many programs generate such files when you start
them for the first time, and they are rarely cleaned up when they fall out
of use.

Notice that this column is not enabled by default. If you would like to use
it, switch to layout L2 or L3, right-click the tree header to open the
columns context menu, select _Hidden Columns_, then _Show Column "Oldest
File"_.

Of course you can also sort by this column to see the oldest files first
(or last).

- Fixed text color in histogram in dark widget themes
[(GitHub Issue #117)](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/117).

--------------------

- 2020-02-12

- Fine-tuned error handling: If there is a "permission denied" error while
reading a directory, this will now be shown much more clearly: There is now
a clear distinction between "permission denied" any other generic "read
error".

- For directories that could not be read because of insufficient permissions,
now also showing an additional "locked" icon in the details panel, and
coloring the permissions field in red to point to the cause of the problem.

This color can be configured in `~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf`:

[DetailsPanel]
DirReadErrColor=#ff0000

- 2020-02-11

- Now also showing the exact byte size of all size fields (of 1 kB and above)
upon click in the "Details" panel. All clickable fields there are now
underlined just like a hyperlink when the mouse hovers above them.

I thought long and hard about using tool tips for that, but tool tips have
a nasty habit of getting in the way and obscuring other information that
the user might want to read; so I decided to use explicit mouse clicks.

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-byte-size-2a.png">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-byte-size-2a.png)

_Hovering over fields that can be clicked shows them underlined, very much
like a hyperlink._

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-byte-size-2b.png">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-byte-size-2b.png)

_Clicking (left or right mouse button) shows more details: In this case, the
exact byte size._

- 2019-12-22

- Brought back the exact byte size as the context menu for the "Size" column in the tree:

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-byte-size.png" height="300">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-byte-size.png)

I.e. a right click on the size now shows the exact number of bytes to avoid
confusion between those people who know what a Megabyte or Gigabyte is and
those who introduced the confusion with 1000-based units vs. the good old
1024-based units that everybody in IT uses (including Microsoft everywhere
in all versions of Windows).

_Back in the early days of computing, everything was easy: a Kilobyte was
1024 bytes, a Megabyte was 1024 Kilobytes, and Gigabytes were Science
Fiction. Then some morons came along who insisted on 1000-based units like
everywhere in Physics. And they and the Real Engineers introduced a foul
compromise: Rename 1024-based units to Kibibytes, Mibibytes etc. and
redefine Kilobytes to be 1000 bytes, Megabytes to become 1000 Kilobytes
etc.; since that day there is confusion what is what._

**QDirStat always used and always will use 1024-based units.**

- 2019-11-02

- Added a separate window to report all directories that could not be read
(typically because of insufficient permissions). This window is opened only
on request: When the user clicks on the "Details..." link in the panel
message that reports that some directories could not be read.

This window is non-modal, i.e. you can still interact with the main window
when it is open. Click on any directory that it lists to locate it in the
main window.

- Directories that could not be read are now also correctly reported in the
unpackaged files view. Since they are empty when they could not be read,
they will always end up in an `<Ignored>` branch which was previously not
taken into account when reporting directories with read errors. This is now
fixed.

- 2019-08-24

- If directories could not be read (typically because of insufficient
permissions), now also posting a warning message in a new message panel.

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-err-dirs-light.png" width="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-err-dirs-light.png)
[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-err-dirs-dark.png" width="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-err-dirs-dark.png)

You can close the message with the `[x]` close button on its right side,
but you can also simply leave it open. This is a lot less obtrusive than a
pop-up dialog, yet less temporary than a message in the bottom status line
that will disappear in a few seconds or when anything else is reported.

The infrastructure for this enables multiple such messages that can be
closed in any order (or not at all) as the user likes. Each message can
have a "Details..." link (not used in these examples) to provide more
information.

- 2019-08-22

- Improved handling for directories that could not be read.

When you run QDirStat as a normal (non-root) user on system directories, it
is very common that you get a "permission denied" error for directories
that contain sensitive information. Such a directory gets a folder icon
with a little lock to indicate that it's locked for you; there is no way to
find out how much disk space it consumes.

Now, such directories are also displayed in a special color (for now bright
red) in the tree. All their parents are now displayed in another (slightly
less obtrusive) color to indicate that you probably don't see the complete
disk space information for that subdirectory.

In those examples, The `/etc/ssl/private` directory does not have read
permissions for non-root users; note the icon with the lock and the red
text color.

When you don't open that branch in the tree, you might not realize this;
it's also in the log file, but most users don't read that. So its parent
directories `/etc/ssl` and `/etc` are also displayed in a different color:
Dark red in the light widget theme and yellow in the dark widget theme.

In addition to that, the parent directories now show a `>` prefix for the
size, number of items, number of files, number of subdirs fields to
indicate that there may be more. This is a hint (not only, but also) for
color blind users.

- 2019-08-12

- Toned down over-information to reduce clutter:

- No longer showing column "Oldest File" in layout L2 by default.

Of course, you can always re-enable this if you like:
Just switch to layout L2, right-click on the column header to open the
column context menu, then "Hidden Columns" -> "Show Column 'Oldest File'".

- Removed "Oldest File" from the details panel for directories:

I found that this does not contribute any useful information here, yet it
adds to the screen clutter. Information about the oldest file in a
subtree is useful to drill down deeper into the subtree to find it, so
the tree view is much better suited for that; having that information in
the details panel as well does not add any value for that procedure.

- 2019-08-03

- Fixed text color in histogram in dark widget themes
[(GitHub Issue #117)](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/117).

- 2019-08-01

- Added a column "Oldest File" that shows the timestamp (the mtime) of the
oldest file in a subtree. This is strictly about files; directories,
symlinks and special files (block or character devices, FIFOs etc.) are
ignored for this.

This is the first simple approach for
[GitHub Issue #118](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/118).
(Click for screenshot)

This already helped me to spot some old cruft in my home directory; some
dot directories from ancient versions of flashplayer and whatnot. This
is more helpful than I initially thought.

- Added an entry "Oldest File" that does the same in the details panel for
directories and packages.

- 2019-07-22 **New stable release: V1.6**

- Performance improvement while reading directories: On average 25% faster on
normal (non-SSD) disks

See also this article: [Linux Disk Usage Tools Compared: QDirStat
vs. K4DirStat vs. Baobab vs. Filelight vs. ncdu including
benchmarks](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/97)

- Vast performance improvement for huge directories (with 100.000 entries or
more in a single directory) in the tree view: There is now instant response
for jumping from the first to the last item, dragging the scroll bar or
using the mouse wheel.

- New **packages view**:
QDirStat can now visualize the file lists of installed packages:

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-pkg-details.png" height="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-pkg-details.png)

I.e. files are now grouped by the package they belong to, and in each
subtree only the files that belong to the package are displayed: In this
example, in `/usr/bin` only the `chromium-browser` binary is displayed, not
all the other files in `/usr/bin`. This is intentional.

You can display all installed packages with their file lists (but that
takes a while), or you can select just a subset. Use Menu _File_ -> _Show
Installed Packages_ or start QDirStat with a `pkg:/` command line argument.

As with the other package manager related features, this is supported for
all Linux distributions that use one of _dpkg_, _rpm_ or _pacman_ (or any
higher-level package manager based on any of those like _apt_, _zypper_
etc.).

More details at [Pkg-View.md](doc/Pkg-View.md).

- New **unpackaged files view**:

QDirStat can now visualize the files in system directories that are not
packaged, i.e. that are not part of any file list of any installed software
package.

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-unpkg-usr-share-qt5.png" height="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-unpkg-usr-share-qt5.png)

This can be useful to track down problems after package upgrades or after
manually installing software with `sudo make install`.

This is supported for all Linux distributions that use _dpkg_ or _rpm_ (or
any higher-level package manager based on any of those like _apt_, _zypper_
etc.).

More details at [Unpkg-View.md](doc/Unpkg-View.md).

- New standard cleanup: _Check File Type_. This uses the `file` command to
find out more detailed information what exactly a file is and displays it
in the cleanup output window.

More details, screenshots and how to get it if you already have an existing
QDirStat cleanup configuration file (i.e. if you used QDirStat before):
[GitHub Issue #102](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/102).

- Implemented [GitHub Issue #90](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/90):
Support excluding directories containing a file with a specific name or pattern.

Similar to some backup tools, you can now specify an exclude rule that lets
you exclude a directory that contains a file like `.nobackup` or
`.qdirstatexclude`.

- Greatly improved the man page; see `man 1 qdirstat`.

- Some bug fixes.

See also the [release announcement](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/releases/tag/1.6).

--------------------------------------------------

- 2019-07-18

- Greatly improved the man page; see `man 1 qdirstat`.

It started with the Debian maintainer of QDirStat asking for a man page
because that's a standard requirement for Debian packages, and he even
wrote the initial one; thanks again, Patrick!.

That initial man page was very concise, and as QDirStat keeps evolving, not
only was there an increasing number of command line options that was not
documented in the man page (but of course when invoking the program with
the `--help` command line option), but it also didn't explain much beyond
the command line arguments.

Now it contains not only the latest set of command line arguments including
syntax and meaning of `pkg:/` and `unpkg:/` URLs, but also some general
information what the program is (including what the treemap is) and how to
use it.

- 2019-07-08

New **unpackaged files view**:

QDirStat can now visualize the files in system directories that are not
packaged, i.e. that are not part of any file list of any installed software
package.

This reads the complete file lists first (i.e. all file lists from all
installed packages), then reads the requested directory as usual and puts the
files that are packaged in a special branch `<Ignored>` in the tree view.

Those files are _not_ displayed in the treemap, i.e. the treemap now only
contains unpackaged files.

**What is this Good For?**

- Recovering a wrecked system after botched upgrades

- Recovering from too much `sudo make install`

- Fixing packaging problems, e.g. find leftover shared libs that tend to get in
the way

- QA for distro release managers, QA engineers, PMs

- Satisfying user curiosity

- _Because we can!_ ;-)

More details at [Unpkg-View.md](doc/Unpkg-View.md).

Comments and questions are welcome at [GitHub Issue #110](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/110).

If you have a genuine problem with the new feature, please open a separate
issue so it can be tracked properly.

- 2019-06-16

- Added [documentation for the _pkg-tools_ scripts](scripts/pkg-tools/README.md).

In short, they can be used to see unpackaged files on a system that uses
one of the supported package managers (_dpkg_, _rpm_, _pacman_), but it's a
bit of a clunky solution, so this is meant for advanced users only.

~~With a little bit of luck, there _may_ be a better solution forthcoming
with real integration into QDirStat's GUI.~~

_Update 2019-07-08: This real integration into the GUI is now available._

- 2019-05-12

- New standard cleanup: _Check File Type_. This uses the `file` command to
find out more detailed information what exactly a file is and displays it
in the normal cleanup output window (the orange text is the interesting
part).

More details and screenshots at [GitHub Issue #102](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/102).
Notice that you can also add this to any older version of QDirStat.

- 2019-05-11

- Implemented the single-command call to get all file lists for all installed
packages for _rpm_ as well.

Now it's only _pacman_ that still needs a separate external command for
each package. If anybody knows how to do this for _pacman_ as well, please
let me know.

- Another drastic performance improvement in the packages view:

Now down to **6.5 seconds** on my system from initially 180 seconds for
getting all file lists for all 2400 installed packages.

| sec | Version | Description |
|------:|------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
| 180.0 | ce3e793298 | First pkg view; sequential separate `dpkg -L` calls |
| 53.4 | 68038f0525 | Separate `dpkg -L` calls in multiple background processes |
| 38.5 | ce54879a48 | Single `dpkg -S "*"` call to get all file lists for all pkg at once |
| 37.7 | 45b0a7a941 | Use cache for `lstat()` syscalls |
| 24.6 | c50e9a7686 | Use slower update timer for tree view while reading |
| 6.5 | a1043a20fb | Keep tree collapsed during reading |

(Much) more details at [GitHub Issue #101](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/101).

- 2019-05-10

Drastic performance improvements in the packages view:

- When reading many (configurable; right now 200) package lists, QDirStat no
longer fires off a separate background process (6 in parallel at any given
time) for each external command (`dpkg-query --listfiles` or `rpm -ql` or
`pacman -Qlp`) and collects their output.

Rather, it now tries to use a single external command that can return all
file lists for all packages at once. It builds a cache from that and uses
it to build the internal tree as it processes the read jobs for each
package one by one.

Right now this works for _dpkg_ (`dpkg -S "*"`). Experiments show that it
will also work for _rpm_ (that's on the _to do_ list).

But there does not seem to be an equivalent command for _pacman_; it looks
as if _pacman_ can only return a file list for a single package or a list
of all installed packages, but without any reference what package each file
in that list belongs to. _If anybody knows, please contact me._

- Now caching the result of `lstat()` syscalls for directories in the package
view since most packages share common system directories like `/usr`,
`/usr/bin`, `/usr/share` etc.; `lstat()` is an expensive affair, and even
just avoiding to switch from user space to kernel space and back that often
is a speed improvement.

- Reduced the display update interval in the packages view. While reading
package information, there is not all that much to see anyway. Yet
constantly recalculating the column widths to make sure they fit their
content is expensive. This is now done just every 5 seconds, not 3 times a
second.

There is even a noticeable difference when using the L1 layout and a
smaller window size so there is less content to take care of.

The net effect of all this performance tuning is that on my machine (Xubuntu
18.04 LTS (i.e. _dpkg_) with ~2400 packages) reading all packages with all
their file lists is now down to under 30 seconds from formerly 90 to 120 (it
varied wildly).

- 2019-05-09

- Now no longer showing a directory's own size (the size of the directory
node, not of any file contained in the directory) in the packages view:
This distorted both the treemap and the total sums. Directories are
typically shared between a lot of packages, so it does not make very much
sense to add the size of a very common directory like /usr/bin or /usr/lib
to the total size of each package that owns a file in any of them, thus
accounting for those directories many times. On my system, /usr/bin is
shared between 454 packages, so its 68 kB would be added up 454 times, thus
adding up to 30 MB.

In the treemap that meant that packages that install only one or two very
small files (symlinks!) to a very common directory would show a lot of
empty space; the 56 byte (or so) symlink would be completely dwarfed by the
directory it is in, even if the directory only has 4 kB. A lot of such lone
small files each in a separate directory meant a whole lot of empty space
in the treemap, thus making packages very hard to compare against each
other.

Of course this means that the size of the directory nodes is now completely
missing in the toplevel total sum (the Pkg:/ node in the tree), but that is
much less distorting than multiplying each of those directory node sizes by
the number of packages that have files in each of them.

- No longer regarding the directory's own mtime (modification time) in the
packages view: The latest overall mtime in a subtree cascades upward, so
any change in any subtree would affect the latest mtime in the higher tree
levels. But if that change was caused by something outside of the current
view, this is irrelevant. So if you want to know the latest mtime anywhere
in package _foo_ which includes the /usr/bin/foo command, it is irrelevant
if one hour ago you installed or updated some other package which also
installed some other commands to /usr/bin; you don't want that latest mtime
of the /usr/bin directory to affect the display of every package that has a
file in /usr/bin.

- 2019-05-04

New **packages view**:
QDirStat can now visualize the file lists of installed packages:

I.e. files are now grouped by the package they belong to, and in each subtree
only the files that belong to the package are displayed: In this example, in
`/usr/bin` only the `chromium-browser` binary is displayed, not all the other
files in `/usr/bin`. This is intentional.

You can display all installed packages with their file lists (but that takes
a while), or you can select just a subset. Use Menu _File_ -> _Show Installed
Packages_ or start QDirStat with a `pkg:/` command line argument.

As with the other package manager related features, this is supported for all
Linux distributions that use one of _dpkg_, _rpm_ or _pacman_ (or any
higher-level package manager based on any of those like _apt_, _zypper_ etc.).

More details at [Pkg-View.md](doc/Pkg-View.md).

Comments and questions are welcome at [GitHub Issue #100](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/100).

If you have a genuine problem with the new feature, please open a separate
issue so it can be tracked properly.

- 2019-04-12

- **Performance improvement** while reading directories: **25% faster** on my
/work directory with an ext4 filesystem with 230 GB / 216k items on a
rotational (non-SSD) disk; with cleared caches now 24.5 sec average
compared to previously 32.5 sec average (with filled caches down to 1.5
from previously 2.0 sec).

It now uses `fstatat()` (instead of `lstat()`) which accepts the file
descriptor of an open directory, so glibc and the kernel save the time
previously needed for parsing the path and locating the directory; that
part will also bring some speed improvement for SSDs.

In addition to that, the entries for each directory are now sorted by i-no
before calling `fstatat()` so the kernel can now read the i-nodes on disk
in sequential order, thus saving disk seek times. SSD users will not
benefit from that since there are no disk seek times on an SSD.

- Now using the name as the secondary sort field in the tree view if the
primary sort field (usually the size) is equal for two items.

It had turned out that by default the underlying QTreeView widget queries
each item in turn how tall it wants to become (using the `sizeHint()`)
which in turn had to query the font for each one for its metrics.

QDirStat now sets the QTreeView's `uniformRowHeights` flag to indicate that
all rows have the same height, so this only needs to be done for the first
one, and the result is simply multiplied by the number of items.

Amazingly enough it was not sorting the items (which is what comes to mind
when there is such a performance bottleneck), no, it was something as
mundane as the widget having to figure out the proportions of its scroll
bar slider vs. the scroll bar overall length. And for that, it needs to
know the number of items (which is simple) and the height of each one
(which was not).

The reason why the widget does that is because each item might have a
different font or a different icon, and then each item might have a
different height. That `uniformRowHeights` flag tells it that this is not
the case.

- 2019-04-06

- New article _Linux Disk Usage Tools Compared: QDirStat vs. K4DirStat
vs. Baobab vs. Filelight vs. ncdu_ including benchmarks:
[GitHub Issue #97](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/97)

(written in the GitHub issue tracker so users can join the discussion)

- 2019-04-05

- Performance boost for huge directories (with 100.000 entries or more in a single
directory):

A routine that counts the direct children of a directory now uses a cached
value for each directory so it does not have to be recalculated over and
over again even if nothing changed. Amazingly enough, this little thing had
turned out to be the performance bottleneck that had made QDirStat
prohibitively slow for such directories. It was not the sorting of the
entries (the sort order was always cached), no, the problem was something
as trivial as counting the children on the current level of the tree view.

Of course, a directory that contains 100.000 entries in a single level
still has quite some performance impact, but at least now it's
tolerable. This was tested with up to 500.000 entries in a single directory
(there is now a script that can create such a directory in the test/util
directory of the source tree).

Hint: Avoid dragging the vertical scroll bar of the tree view in such a
directory; better use keyboard commands such as the _Home_ or the _End_
key. The scroll bar will make the underlying Qt widget go through every
single entry in turn, and that will take a while (it will eventually become
responsive again, though).

_Update 2019-04-12: This is now no longer an issue; using
`uniformRowHeights` fixed that._

- Implemented [GitHub Issue #90](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/90):
Support excluding directories containing a file with a specific name or pattern.

Similar to some backup tools, you can now specify an exclude rule that lets
you exclude a directory that contains a file like `.nobackup` or
`.qdirstatexclude`. The exclude rule configuration now has a new option for
that:

[<img width="300" src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-config-exclude.png" >](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-config-exclude.png)

This makes it possible to reuse such files that are there anyway for some
other tool and get a good idea how large the resulting backup will become.

Since this change required some refactoring in a quite sensitive part
(reading the directories), please watch out for possible bugs that this might
have introduced and report it if you find something.

--------

- 2018-11-07 **New stable release: V1.5**

Summary:

- (Optional) breadcrumbs navigation

- (Optional) a new "details" panel for the currently selected item

- (Optional) new tree columns:
owner, group, permissions both in "rwxrwxrwx" and in octal format

- Package manager support for the major Linux package managers (dpkg / rpm /
pacman) to see what package a system file belongs to.

- Quick-switchable different layouts for the main window

- A new "General" page in the configuration dialog

- Show in the window title if the program runs with root permissions (`sudo`
etc.)

- (Optional) show the URL in the window title

- Some bug fixes

For more details, see the [full release announcement](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/releases/tag/1.5).

- 2018-11-03

Added showing release notes (in an external web browser) to the "Help" menu
("What's New in this Release").

- 2018-10-26

The pre-1.5 Beta is out: [QDirStat-1.4.97-Beta](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/releases/tag/1.4.97-Beta)

- 2018-10-21

- Updated all screenshots to the latest Git source version in preparation for the
upcoming pre-1.5 Beta.

- Added a little left margin to the "Latest MTime" column in the tree to make
it look less overcrowded.

- 2018-10-20

- Reintroduced showing the elapsed time during directory reading.

You might have noticed that QDirStat's performance has decreased with all
the kernel patches to work around the Meltdown and Spectre security
problems caused by CPU design; system calls have become a lot more
expensive in terms of performance now. And QDirStat does a LOT of system
calls while reading directories: `opendir()` / `readdir()` for each
directory in the tree and `lstat()` for every single file or directory
found in the tree: My 6.8 GB root filesystem has 275,000 items total and
25,500 directories which means well over 300,000 system calls. Every single
one of them now causes kernel page tables to be cleared and restored for
every switch between user space and kernel space, and that means quite some
performance impact.

This all means that it's now worthwhile again to display the elapsed time
during directory reading. It used to be over in a heartbeat, so it wasn't
worthwhile to display that; but that's different now.

- Added a _General_ page to the configuration dialog for miscellaneous
settings.

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-config-general.png" width="300">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-config-general.png)

This is a bit unorganized (as might be expected for misc settings), but
those misc settings had accumulated over time, so I decided to finally add
such a page.

The settings were always accessible, but only by editing the config file
(`~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf`) manually. For some settings you might
still have to do that: Some are too exotic for general use, some others
would confuse the average user much more than they would help.

- 2018-10-19

- Added different layouts to the main window:

You can now switch between three (at the moment) different layout options
for the upper half of QDirStat's main window.

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-details-file-L1.png" width="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-details-file-L1.png)
[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-details-file-L2.png" width="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-details-file-L2.png)
[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-details-file-L3.png" width="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-details-file-L3.png)

- Layout 1 (short): Display only a bare minimum of columns in the tree
view, but show the new details panel on the right side. This is to
minimize clutter in the tree view, yet keep all the information
available.

- Layout 2 (classic): Display the same columns as always in the tree view
and additionally the new details panel on the right side.

- Layout 3 (full): Display all available columns in the tree view,
including the new file owner, group, permissions in both "rwxrwxrwx" and
octal. But don't display the new display side panel so there is enough
screen space to show all those columns.

Switching between the layouts is as easy as pressing one of the three new
buttons in the tool bar: L1, L2, L3. Or use the corresponding entries in
the "View" menu. Or use the Alt-1, Alt-2, Alt-3 key combinations.

For each view, you can individually configure what columns to display and
whether or not to display the new details side panel and / or the new
breadcrumbs navigator.

The column widths are still configured globally (and this will remain like
that); I experimented with that and found it _very_ awkward to have to set
all of them individually for each layout.

- We are approaching a new release (I guess you figured that with all the
recent changes). Most likely there will be at least one Beta release (if
there are problems maybe more) before the 1.5-stable release.

- There is still some (limited) time to add even more package managers if
anybody feels inclined to submit patches. But please be advised that I
can't do much maintenance for any of those since I don't have any system
with them readily available to test anything; the ones that I have use
_dpkg_ or _rpm_.

- Fixed [GitHub Issue #86](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/86):
CacheWriter errors go unnoticed much too easily.

This was a direct result of me giving in to nagging people wanting features
of very limited value: The status bar flickering like crazy all the time
because somebody back some time ago had wanted the current treemap tile's
path and size in the status bar as the mouse hovers over it.
[GitHub Issue #30](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/30)

The effect is that nobody pays attention anymore at all to that status bar
because it's flickering all the time anyway, so it has become useless as a
tool to report anything of importance; and status bar messages are gone
immediately, too, when the user happens to move the mouse across the
treemap.

As a consequence, I just disabled that by default; if anybody really wants
it, edit the QDirStat config file (`~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf`) and
enable it again:

UseTreemapHover=true

_Update 2018-10-20: This can now be changed in the new "General" page of
the configuration dialog; no need to edit the config file manually._

- 2018-10-18

- Added support for the _pacman_ package manager for Manjaro and Arch Linux.

This should now cover the most common package managers for Linux to find
out what package a system file belongs to: _dpkg_, _rpm_, _pacman_.

As mentioned before, higher-level package managers such as _apt_, _zypper_,
_yum_ or front-ends like _synaptic_, _PackageKit_ all use one of the
lower-level package managers internally, so it doesn't matter if you never
used one of the lower-level tools before.

- Tried to add support for the _pkg_ package manager ("pkg info") for FreeBSD
/ OpenBSD, but unfortunately it only knows what package owns files of
_ports_ / _3rd party_, not for the base system.

The helpful people in the _#freebsd_ IRC channel on _freenode_ confirmed
that. So this will have to wait until there is useful support for it from
the system side on those platforms. _BSD people, let me know!_

- 2018-10-16

- QDirStat now shows `[root]` in the window title if it is running with root
privileges.

- If invoked with `sudo`, now restoring the owner of the config files to the
real user (if possible) if those file are in the user's home directory.
Previously on some systems they were owned by _root_ which meant they were
no longer writable by the real user, silently discarding all subsequent
changes to the configuration (including window sizes etc).

This might be different depending on how `sudo` is configured on a system;
on SUSE, it uses the root user's home directory, on Ubuntu, the home
directory of the user who invoked `sudo`.

- 2018-10-07

Added better classification of files to the new file details view:

- MIME Category - this is the same as in the treemap colors, the same as you
can configure in the _MIME Categories_ page in the QDirStat configuration
dialog. By default, it shows very broad categories ("Documents, "Music",
"Images", "Videos", "Source Files", ...), but you can configure them to
much finer detail if you wish.

- System file or not. This is important if you want to run any cleanup
actions in that directory; you probably don't want to mess with system
files, even if running QDirStat as root.

A system file in this context is a file that is either owned by a system
user (a UID < 500) or that is located in a known system directory (/usr,
/lib, ..., but not /usr/local).

- For system files, the package that this file belongs to. This gives a
surprising amount of insight (it was surprising to me, at least) where all
the disk space on the system directories goes to, most importantly some of
the big blobs in the tremap.

As of now, this is supported for Linux systems using a package manager
based on _dpkg_ or on _rpm_:

- Debian

- Ubuntu / Kubuntu / Xubuntu / Lubuntu

- SUSE (openSUSE Tumbleweed or Leap, SLES)

- Red Hat (Fedora, RHEL)

... and dozens more (basically all that are based on any of the above).

This works by running `dpkg -S` or `rpm -qf` as external commands, so this
is a somewhat expensive operation. To keep the user interface responsive,
QDirStat now has an "adaptive timer" for updating that information:
Normally, the result is shown instantly, but if you click around wildly,
there is a timer that is increased or decreased (thus "adaptive") for a
delayed update after that timeout (0 / 333 / 1000 / 2500 millisec right
now).

It can even handle _rpm_ installed as a foreign package manager on a _dpkg_
based system (and the other way round); it tries the primary package
manager first, then any others that are also installed.

Please notice that _apt_, _synaptic_, _zypper_, _pkgkit_ and whatnot are
all higher level package managers that ultimately use one of the low level
ones, so even if you only use a higher level package manager, it still
works without restriction.

If your system does not use _dpkg_ or _rpm_, those who can are invited to
contribute patches for other package managers; it's really simple:

https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/src/PkgManager.cpp#L140

The API is not final yet; there may be more regexp support in the near
future (so it will only get simpler). But you get the idea.

--------------------------------------------------

- 2018-10-03

- Added a new details view next to the tree view.
Of course this can be disabled (Menu _View_ -> uncheck _Show Details Panel_).

This view shows context-sensitive information about the currently selected
item(s); see also the screenshots (still not complete, but you get the idea):

[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-details-file-L2.png" height="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-details-file-L2.png)
[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-details-dir.png" height="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-details-dir.png)
[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-details-dot-entry.png" height="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-details-dot-entry.png)
[<img src="https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-details-multi-sel.png" height="250">](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/master/screenshots/QDirStat-details-multi-sel.png)

What that details view displays so far:

- File: name, type (file / symlink / block device / character device /
FIFO), size, user, group, permissions both as rwxrwxrwx and octal,
modification time.

- Directory: name with appended slash to easier recognize what it is, type
(directory), subtree total size, total items, total files, total
subdirs, latest modification time in the entire subtree; directory own
size, user, group, permissions both as rwxrwxrwx and octal, modification
time of the directory node itself (that was never shown before).

- <Files> pseudo directory: Only the subtree information like for a
directory, but no user / group / permissions since there is no
counterpart for it on the filesystem.

- Multi-selection: Number of selected items, total size, number of files,
number of directories, number of files in any subtrees of those
directories. This should show a bit more clearly what is affected if you
choose to delete all that selected stuff.

The view can scroll, so extremely long file names (as are common e.g. below
`.git/objects` directories don't blow this view up to take all the screen
space away from the tree and the treemap.

- Unified the different size columns into one: No more "Subtree Size" and
"Own Size" separately, but now just "Size". The reasoning used to be that
there was no way to tell how large the directory node itself was. But that
information is now readily available in the details view if anybody is
really interested.

Plans for the immediate future:

- Add some package manager support, at least for the very common ones on
Linux (_deb_ and _rpm_ so far): Find out what package a system file belongs
to and show it (on demand or after a short delay) in the details view. This
can be done even as non-root with some commands like `dpkg -S` or `rpm
-qf`. There will probably be support for adding your own command lines in
the config file if you use another package manager.

- Some simple checks if a file is probably a system file; for example, files
below `/usr/bin` (and other very common system directories) and/or files
that are owned by a user with a UID < 500 (or so) are very likely system
files that should be very careful to delete. The details view should show
you that; maybe there should also be a warning in the cleanup actions if
any such files are affected by a potentially destructive cleanup action.

- Easily switchable different layouts for the tree columns and the details
view:

- Minimalistic: Only the bare essentials of columns plus the details view.

This should remove a lot of the current clutter on the screen, and it
should display the same information, only rearranged a bit. How often do
you really need fields like number of items / files / subdirs in the tree
view? They would be most useful there if you wish to sort the tree after
any of them. How often do you do that? And with the new details view, the
information is still available, but does not clutter the table.

- Default: Pretty much what you can see now in the new screenshots

- Maximum information: All columns, including the new user / group /
permissions columns, but (to make space) no details view

If it makes sense (not sure yet), maybe also user defined views (say, 3 of
them?) that you can define to your personal liking. I kinda like how camera
makers use that (U1 / U2 on Nikon cameras, C1 / C2 / C3 on Canon and
Panasonic). I am not completely sure yet just how useful that is; I'll need
to experiment.

- 2018-10-02 Implemented a _breadcrumbs_ widget to show the current path and
for easier navigation up the directory hierarchy. See also the new
screenshots.

Of course this can be disabled (Menu _View_ -> uncheck _Show Current Path_).

- 2018-09-27 Fixed [GitHub issue #84](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/84):
Crash if picking up a cache file in the starting directory (subtree root).

This was a crash that happened when users had used the supplied
_qdirstat-cache-writer_ script to generate cache files in certain directories
for faster directory scanning (at the price of having slightly outdated
data), and QDirStat was not started with that cache file as a command line
argument, but it would find it while reading the directory at the starting
directory (and only there). This was probably broken for a long time, yet
nobody had noticed (or nobody bothered to write a bug report). This might be
an indication that this cache file feature is not widely used, so only a
small number of users seem to be affected. Anyway, this is now fixed.

- 2018-09-23 Implemented [GitHub issue #80](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/80):
Show directory/file user (owner), group and permissions in the tree view.

Those new columns are not visible by default. Use the context menu in the
tree columns header to enable them. They might be useful for some users; for
others, they may be just more clutter being displayed.

Sorting by those columns is somewhat basic; both user and group are sorted by
the numeric uid or guid; the permissions are sorted by the numeric value of
the mode field. Looking up user or group names is a somewhat costly
operation. It might also make sense to order system files first (user with
UID 0, i.e. root; other system users also have small UIDs.)

See issue #80 for a screenshot.

- 2018-08-26 Noah Davis (noahdvs) contributed a new application icon for QDirStat:

I had made the old icon myself back in early 2000 for the first KDirStat 0.86
release. I never liked it very much, but the new application just needed an
icon. Finally somebody with more artistic talent than myself made one that
looks a lot more professional. Thank you, Noah!

- 2018-04-26 Implemented [GitHub issue #77](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/77):
Show the current URL in the window title. This is disabled by default.
You can enable it manually in the config file (`~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf`):

[MainWindow]
...
UrlInWindowTitle=true

Some day this will be configurable in a new tab in the configuration dialog,
but right now there are only so few options that would go to such a "General"
or "Misc" tab that it would look pretty lost and unorganized.

- 2018-02-08 Fixed [GitHub issue #74](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/74):
Crash deleting folder while scan is in progress

This fix comes on two levels:

- A fix on the GUI-level that simply makes sure that the "move to trash"
action in the tool bar / context menu is disabled while a directory tree is
read.

- A fix on the low-level internal classes for the in-memory directory tree
and the read job queue: This now also makes sure that whenever a subtree is
deleted from the outside (e.g. because of cleanup actions), any pending
directory read jobs for that subtree are removed from the job queue.

- 2018-02-03 Fixed [GitHub issue #72](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/72):
Allow to specify install prefix

You can now install to another location like `/usr/local` if desired.
The default remains `/usr`. See section _Install to a Custom Directory_.

- 2018-01-12 Some small fixes:

- Fixed duplicate keyboard shortcut for actions "Stop Reading" (now: Ctrl-S)
and "Copy URL to Clipboard" (still Ctrl-C).

- Fixed exclude rules not matching correctly against direct root directory
children: A rule that should match "/var" now works correctly. You'd need
to specify "//var" in the rule which of course was wrong.

- Now only adding the default exclude rule ".snapshot" once. If you remove
that one, it should no longer keep reappearing if there are no other
exclude rules.

- Fixed some minor issues in the exclude rule configuration dialog with some
widgets not being correctly disabled if they made no sense to use.

----------------------------

- 2017-06-04 **New stable release: V1.4**

It's about time to ship all those latest changes.

- 2017-06-04 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).

- 2017-05-31 Fixed [GitHub Issue #61](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/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!

- 2017-05-12 Checked code with [Coverity](https://scan.coverity.com/)

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.

- 2017-04-21 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.

- 2017-04-14 _Let's do some real statistics_

It's been a while since the last official news here, but I wasn't idle during
that time:

![File Size Histogram Screenshot](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-histogram.png)

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 I added those explanations as a bonus. There is a landing page
for that in that new window:

![File Size Help](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-stats-help.png)

Or you might use
[this](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/tree/master/doc/stats)
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](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/doc/stats/Median-Percentiles.md)
document to convince yourself that really **everybody** can easily understand
this.

I also opened a
[GitHub issue to discuss this](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/60);
comments are welcome.

- 2017-03-10 Filling the gaps in the treemap

[GitHub issue #58](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/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 I experimented 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.

Then I tried gradients. The first impression was good, but then I found 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 I
wouldn't want to give that up. After playing a bit with the gradient
parameters (toning it down and giving it just a little blueish tint) I ended
up with this:

![Using Gradients](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/11538225/23812600/7e769e48-05db-11e7-820c-2a6f70916403.png)

I think this is 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...).

----------------------------

- 2017-03-05 **New stable release: V1.3**

- 2017-02-27 Implemented [GitHub issue #30](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/30):

When hovering over a treemap tile, display the full path and the total size
of that element in the status bar. When the hover ends (when the mouse cursor
leaves the treemap tile), display the current selection again in the status
bar.

- 2017-02-24 Improved logging: More secure and automatically log-rotating.

QDirStat now uses its own log directory `/tmp/qdirstat-$USER` (where `$USER`
is your user name; the numeric user ID is now only used if the user name
cannot be obtained). It no longer keeps one single log file growing, but
starts a new one each time it is started. 3 old logs are kept; any older ones
are deleted.

The permissions for that directory are set up in a pretty restrictive way
(0700, i.e. `rwx------`) when it is created. If it already exists, QDirStat
checks the owner and creates a new one with a random name if it is owned by
anyone else than the user who started QDirStat.

[sh @ balrog] ~ 68 % ls -ld /tmp/qdirstat-sh
drwx------ 2 sh sh 4096 Feb 24 18:29 /tmp/qdirstat-sh
[sh @ balrog] ~ 69 % ls -l /tmp/qdirstat-sh
total 16
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sh sh 2067 Feb 24 18:29 qdirstat-00.old
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sh sh 2067 Feb 24 18:07 qdirstat-01.old
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sh sh 2067 Feb 24 18:07 qdirstat-02.old
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sh sh 2067 Feb 24 18:29 qdirstat.log

For anybody regularly watching the log file this means they will now have to
use `tail -F qdirstat.log` rather than `tail -f` since the latter does not
realize when the file it watches is renamed and a new one is created under
the same name.

- 2017-02-23 Fixed [GitHub issue #24](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/24):

During directory reading, subdirectories would get out of sync when opening
a tree branch.

It looks like QDirStat's tree display was a bit too dynamic for the concepts
of the underlying Qt classes (QTreeView / QAbstractItemModel): During
reading, QDirStat would sort the tree by the number of pending read
jobs. That number is constantly changing, so the sort order would also
constantly need to change. This is very hard to do properly with the
limitations those underlying classes impose; basically it would require a
reset of all the data the QTreeView keeps, thus making it forget things like
its current scrollbar position or which tree branches were expanded or
collapsed. That would make the user interface pretty much unusable.

So the fix for this is to not sort by read jobs, but by directory names
instead since they don't change all the time. The user can still sort by any
other column, but that sort is a momentary thing that might become invalid
moments later as data (accumulated sizes, number of child items) are
updated. Everybody please notice that **this is a known limitation** and any
complaints about that will flatly be rejected. The alternative would be to
not allow the user to sort at all during directory reading, and that is
certainly a lot less desirable.

- 2017-02-22

- @flurbius contributed a patch to switch the main window layout from tree
view above and treemap below to side-by-side (Menu _Treemap_ -> _Treemap as
Side Panel_).

- Added new document [GitHub-Workflow.md](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/doc/GitHub-Workflow.md)
explaining how to work with GitHub and Git to contribute to QDirStat.

- 2017-02-20 Locating files by type from the _File Type Statistics_ window

![Locating FilesWindow](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-locating-file-types.png)

You can now locate files with a specific filename extension directly:

- You select a file type (a filename extension) in the "File Type Statistics" window.

- You click "Locate" or you double-click the item.

- The "Locate Files" window opens.

- You click a directory there.

- In the main window, the branch for that directory opens, and all matching
files are selected in the tree view and in the treemap.

- You can now directly start cleanup actions for those files.

See also [GitHub issue #48](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/48).

- 2017-02-18 New document: [QDirStat for Servers](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/doc/QDirStat-for-Servers.md)
describing how to use QDirStat and the `qdirstat-cache-writer` script on
headless (no X server, no X libs) servers.

- 2017-02-17 _File Type Statistics_ window merged to Git master

Latest screenshot:

![File Type Statistics Window Screenshot](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/blob/master/screenshots/QDirStat-file-type-stats.png)

**Limitations:**

Since filename extensions (suffixes) don't have as much semantics in
Linux/Unix systems as they do in Windows, many files are categorized as
"Other". This is a known limitation, but it's a limitation of the whole
concept of using suffixes to categorize files by type. And no, checking file
headers for magic byte sequences like the "file" command does is not an
option here; QDirStat would have to do that for (at least) all the 30,000+
files typically listed under the "Other" category. So we'll have to live with
that limitation.

Next thing to come: Locating files with a specific suffix from there.
See [GitHub issue #48](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/48).

- 2017-02-12 Working on a _File Type Statistics_ window

People who know WinDirStat inevitably want that _File Type_ view in QDirStat,
too. I was really reluctant to do that because I didn't quite see the point;
in WinDirStat, it serves mostly as a legend to the treemap colors since they
are constantly changing in WinDirStat: The file type that consumes most disk
space always gets color #1, the next-most color #2 etc., so it depends which
directory you scan what color each file type gets. In QDirStat, the colors
are stable; they are predefined and configurable in the _MIME Type
Categories_ configuration dialog.

And as most of you probably know, filename extensions have a much stricter
meaning in Windows than on Linux/Unix systems; Linux people get very creative
when it comes to using dots in filenames. Sometimes those dots delimit a
filename's extension (suffix) from its base name, sometimes they are used for
entirely different purposes.

Anyway, there was one user who was insistent enough to make me reconsider,
and I did some experimenting this weekend, and now we have an (albeit still
experimental) **File Type Statistics** view. So far, that code lives in a Git
branch, but I think it will stabilize in the next one or two weeks, so I will
merge it to Git master.

See the whole discussion with more screenshots at
[GitHub issue #45](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/45)

- 2017-01-03 **New stable release: V1.2**

_Upgrading to this release is highly recommended for Btrfs users:_

If you used QDirStat to scan a Btrfs partition, any subvolumes of that
partition were not scanned (see
[GitHub issue #39](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/39)).

Btrfs subvolumes were treated just like ordinary mount points (which, to all
intents and purposes, they are). So you might have wondered why the _df_
command shows your 40 GB root filesystem as 97% full, yet QDirStat shows only
about 7 GB. The rest might be hidden in subvolumes.

QDirStat stops reading at mount points - which only makes sense because
normally you want to know what eats up the disk space on that one partition
that is filling up, not on any others like /home that are mounted
there. Unfortunately, a Btrfs subvolume is also just another mount point, and
QDirStat would stop reading there, too - at /var/log, at /var/spool, at
/var/lib/libvirt etc.; a typical Btrfs root filesystem has about a dozen
subvolumes, and all files in them were disregarded by QDirStat.

This is now fixed: Despite Btrfs doing its best to make this difficult (using
one single privileged system call for all its functionality, including simple
info calls), QDirStat now detects if a mount point is a Btrfs subvolume and
continues reading if it is. QDirStat uses /proc/mounts (or, if this is not
available, /etc/mtab) to find this out.

This is fixed in the _qdirstat-cache-writer_ script, too.

- 2016-12-11 Bernhard Walle contributed some patches for MacOS X support.
Thanks, Bernhard!

- 2016-12-09 Fixed Perl (_qdirstat-cache-writer_) part of
[GitHub issue #39](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/39):
QDirStat doesn't scan Btrfs subvolumes

The _qdirstat-cache-writer_ script now also checks the device names of a
mount point and its parent directory, not only their major/minor device
numbers; so now it will not stop at Btrfs subvolumes while scanning.

That script uses a more simplistic approach than QDirStat itself: It invokes
the _df_ command with that path and parses its output. If the path contains
very weird special characters, this may fail, in which case that directory
(which at that point is already known to have a different device major/minor
number than its parent) is considered a filesystem boundary, and that branch
is not scanned.

- 2016-12-08 Fixed C++ (QDirStat binary) part of
[GitHub issue #39](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/39):
QDirStat doesn't scan Btrfs subvolumes

This was a bit of a challenge since the relevant Btrfs commands to obtain any
useful information about subvolumes all require root privileges, and I really
wouldn't want to scare users off by prompting for a _sudo_ password. QDirStat
now fetches the information from /proc/mounts (or /etc/mtab if /proc/mounts
is unavailable) and does some heuristics (which are not completely fool
proof) to check if a potential mount point is still on the same device. That
means that it will no longer treat a Btrfs subvolume as an ordinary mount
point where it stops reading by default, but it just continues. On the other
hand, another Btrfs mounted into the current filesystem is of course treated
as a normal mount point. See also the corresponding
[GitHub issue](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/39)
for details.

The Perl _qdirstat-cache-writer_ still has the old behaviour, i.e. it still
stops at a subvolume mount point. This will be addressed next.

- 2016-12-07 Fixed [GitHub issue #40](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/40):
Crash without useful error message when no display available

When ssh'ing without -X to a remote machine and starting QDirStat there, it
would just dump core and not issue any meaningful message. The fatal error
message was only in the log file:

`<ERROR> :0 (): QXcbConnection: Could not connect to display`

Now this message is also repeated on stderr, and in this particular case
("Could not connect to display"), it does not dump core anymore, but just
exits with error code 1.

- 2016-12-06 **Warning to Btrfs users** (Fixed as of 2012-12-09)

If you use QDirStat to scan a Btrfs partition,
[any subvolumes of that partition are not scanned](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/39):
Btrfs subvolumes are treated just like ordinary
mount points (which, to all intents and purposes, they are). So you might
wonder why the _df_ command shows your 40 GB root filesystem as 97% full, yet
QDirStat shows only about 7 GB. The rest might be hidden in subvolumes.

QDirStat stops reading at mount points - which only makes sense because
normally you want to know what eats up the disk space on that one partition
that is filling up, not on any others like /home that are mounted
there. Unfortunately, a Btrfs subvolume is also just another mount point, and
QDirStat will stop reading there, too - at /var/log, at /var/spool, at
/var/lib/libvirt etc.; a typical Btrfs root filesystem has about a dozen
subvolumes, and all files in them are currently disregarded by QDirStat. You
can of course click on "Continue reading at mount point" individually in
QDirStat's directory tree for each one of them, but that's tedious.

I am working on a solution. One approach would be to check if the current
filesystem is Btrfs and list its subvolumes, but the Btrfs developers in
their infinite wisdom decided that `btrfs subvolume list <path>` is a
privileged operation, so QDirStat would have to use `sudo` with it and prompt
for the root password (at which point I as a user would terminate the program
and not use it anymore). **This is broken by design.** A simple info command
like that should not require root privileges.

- 2016-10-31 (Halloween) **New stable release: V1.1-Pumpkin**

It's about time for another official release to get the accumulated fixes and
small changes out into the world. Since today is Halloween, this release
shall be named _Pumpkin_ (as in the unforgettable Charlie Brown's _Great
Pumpkin_).

The last stable release, V1.0, was in mid-May (2016-05-16). Since then, there
were 5 bug fixes and one small feature (the config file split up into
independent parts so admins can provide presets to their users without
overwriting the complete configuration), all described in greater detail
below.

- 2016-10-23

- Fixed [GitHub issue #32](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/32):
%p does not escape single quotes properly

If you have a file name like `Don't do this.txt` (with a quote character in
the name), the shell used when executing a cleanup action with this would
complain about unmatched single quotes.

QDirStat had always escaped such single quotes, but not the way common
shells (Bash, Zsh) expect it: They don't want a backslash in front of that
embedded single quote. Rather, you need to terminate the string with a
single quote, escape the embedded quote with a backslash (or put it into
double quotes), and then re-open the old string with another single quote.

Thus, `'Don't do this'` becomes `'Don'\''t do this'`.

This is certainly not what most people expect. I just wonder how much other
software is out there that does it the intuitive (yet wrong) way: Just
escape the single quote with a backslash (`'Don\'t do this'`).

Of course, such file names should be avoided entirely, but you can't help
some slightly broken MP3 ripper program doing it, so it needs to be handled
correctly.

- Fixed [GitHub issue #31](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/31):
Segfault with cleanup action while reading directories

Now disabling cleanups that have a refresh policy other than "No Refresh"
while directory reading is in progress; otherwise the re-read when the
cleanup action has finished clashes with the directory read already in
progress.

This is not an optimal solution, but a very pragmatic one; the optimal
solution might queue updates and execute them after the main read is done.

- Fixed [GitHub issue #33](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/33):
Added command line option `--slow-update` (or `-s`) for slow remote X connections.

- 2016-08-12

- Fixed [GitHub issue #23](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/23):

The internal cache writer would sometimes generate incorrect cache files
because of buggy URL escaping resulting in an empty file name and thus
invalid cache file syntax. This affected file names with colons (which is
weird, but legal).

One of these days I'm going to throw out all that QUrl stuff and replace the
few things that I need with something that actually works consistently and
not just under optimum conditions.

- 2016-08-10

- Fixed [GitHub issue #22](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/22):

Cache files containing the root filesystem would not display correctly or
segfault under certain conditions. This is now fixed.

- Added "Refresh All" action to the main window tool bar. I had consciously
avoided that because it's just too tempting to re-read the complete
directory tree rather than think about what actually might have changed and
then refresh just that, but it has become so common to use that action in
web browsers that I found myself missing that more and more. And re-reading
is not that expensive on today's mainstream PCs.

- 2016-07-02

- Fixed [GitHub issue #21](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/21):

When started from a desktop menu, i.e. without any command line parameters,
QDirStat would not prompt for a directory to read, but read the current
directory (typically the user's home directory) right away.

- More graceful handling for nonexisting paths specified on the command
line: It now no longer just throws an exception right after starting the
program (which looks like a crash to the unwary user), but posts an error
popup instead and then asks for a directory to read.

- 2016-06-29

- V1.01 (Development version)

- Split up config file into four separate ones below ~/.config/QDirStat:

- QDirStat.conf
- QDirStat-cleanup.conf
- QDirStat-exclude.conf
- QDirStat-mime.conf

This should make it much easier for site administrators to provide their
own site-wide cleanup actions, exclude rules, or MIME categories. I did
this with this in mind:

http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/kdirstat/kdirstat-for-clusters.html

Here, they describe how users should overwrite their KDirStat config file
with one provided by the site admin so all users have those carefully
crafted cleanup actions. But that also means that all other settings get
lost each time there is a change in any of those commands, and users have
to update that config file again.

With the latest change, it is now possible to only replace the cleanup
action config (QDirStat-cleanup.conf) and leave everything else untouched.

Notice that this is far from a perfect solution; all cleanup actions the
user added himself still get lost. But doing this perfectly might pretty
quickly become an overengineered solution that would be hard to understand
for everybody.

As for migration from previous single-file configurations, QDirStat does
that automatically: It reads the single file and moves the respective parts
where they belong. No need to bother with any migration scrips or anything
like that.

- 2016-05-16 **First stable release: V1.0**

After 3 months of Beta phase and 3 Beta releases, here is finally the
official first stable release of QDirStat: Version 1.0.

In terms of source code, there were very little changes from the last Beta
(0.98-Beta3 from 2016-04-08) and no real code change (only the version number
increased) from the last check-in from 2016-04-11. This version can really be
considered stable in the truest sense of the word. It was not rushed out the
door, and there were no hectic last minute changes. It is well tested, and
the community had ample opportunity to report any problems.

- 2016-04-11

- _buxit_ reported
[GitHub issue #16](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/16)
and contributed the fix for it shortly afterwards:
When clicking in the treemap, the corresponding item in the tree view was
not always scrolled into the visible area. Now it is.

- 2016-04-08

- Beta 3

- Fixed
[GitHub issue #15](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/15):

After a cleanup action is executed that needs refreshing the affected
subtree, the parent directory is selected, which is intentional so the
user's focus is not thrown off completely. There was a bug when you
selected an item in the treemap afterwards, that change was not correctly
propagated to the internal selection model: The parent directory remained
selected (which was wrong), and the newly selected item was just added to
the selection, i.e. that item and (typically) its parent directory was
selected. When a potentially dangerous cleanup operation was now started,
it would affect not only that item, but also the directory; and, worse,
that directory often went out of the visible scope of the tree view. Yes,
the confirmation popup would ask for both of them, but you all know how
quickly users click away those popups without really reading them.
This bug is now fixed.

- Improved the confirmation popup. Now highlighting directories much more if
there is a "mixed" selection, i.e., both directories and non-directories
are selected at the same time:

![New cleanup confirmation popup](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/11538225/14390476/8b022c9a-fdb7-11e5-8eef-a5ba304d3bab.png)

- 2016-03-20

- Beta 2

Beta 1 has now been out for 6 weeks, and I have not received one single bug
report during that time. Maybe it's just business as usual, and people
just keep waiting for others to do the testing, while they themselves are
waiting for a stable release. Well, okay, so let them have their way: The
current code is now officially V0.92 Beta 2. And it won't be another 6
weeks; the next versions will come a lot more quickly. Once V1.0 final is
out, any bug reports will have to wait until there is time to work on
them. So, folks, use those Betas wisely.

BTW those who actually did test it will find that QDirStat is a lot more
stable even in Beta 1 than other pieces of software in their official final
release.

- 2016-02-27

- Debian / Ubuntu packaging contributed by Nathan Rennie-Waldock.
He also made a PPA repository available for various Ubuntu versions - see
[Ubuntu packages](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat#ubuntu) below.

- 2016-02-06

- Added tab for exclude rules configuration to the config dialog (see
screenshot above). That's it: That was the last missing major feature.

**I hereby declare QDirStat to be Beta.**

_Please use the GitHub issue tracker for any bug reports._

- Exclude rules can now optionally match against the full path again. I had
changed this for just the directory name without the path by default, which
makes regexps a lot simpler. You can now select the old behaviour, too, if
you wish. This is configurable in the exclude rules tab of the config
dialog.

- Made the config file format of the new view header columns human readable
and editable. The first version from yesterday used the native format of
Qt's QHeaderView -- a QByteArray in hex encoding. This was a sorry excuse
for a settings format - not usable for anybody, not legible, much less
editable. Trolls, WTF? Pretty and usable formats everywhere else, and a
glorified (well, not even glorified) hexdump here?

I hope some admins who might want to provide ready-made config files for
their users will appreciate that. If not, this is just for consistency's
sake; I want to be able to read and edit my config file as I like, even
without any graphical config dialogs.

- The tree view now uses "middle eliding" for texts that don't fit into a
column. It used to elide at the end of the text, but that's not necessarily
useful for long file names; they often differ only at the end with lots of
text at the start in common. So, now it's no longer "VeryLongTextBlurb...",
but "VeryLongTe...foo.o" if anything needs to be cut off. Of course, this
makes most sense with the new column width modes, otherwise your column
will simply be resized wide enough to fit everything in.

- 2016-02-05

- Extended the context menu of the tree view header columns -- see latest
screenshot above. The configuration is now saved and restored when entering
the program. You can move the columns around (i.e. change their order),
hide columns, and choose between automatic column width ("auto size") or
setting it manually ("interactive size") for each column individually or
for all columns at once.

- You can now read a cache file directly from the command line:

````
qdirstat --cache cache-file
````

- Fixed GitHub issue #9:
[qdirstat-cache-writer creates broken cache file if some directory lacks Exec flag](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/9)

- Fixed GitHub issue #10:
[incorrect handling of sparse files with 0 allocated blocks](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/10)

- 2016-02-02

- Fixed a bug where directory names with a colon ":" were cut off when
reading a cache file, thus all files and directories below that point could
not find their parent directory, so that complete branch was cut off.

- Much improved performance for treemaps of large directory trees: Now not
rebuilding the treemap immediately when the user resizes the window or
drags the splitter dividing the main window, but just scheduling an update
in 200 milliseconds. If another rebuild is requested during this time, the
previous one is discarded. The net effect is that the treemap now is
rebuilt only once, not for every pixel size change of the treemap
subwindow, so the application remains responsive during dragging the
splitter or resizing the main window.

- 2016-02-01

- Fixed GitHub issue #6:
[NullPointerException when reading cache file](https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat/issues/6)

The DirTreeModel and the DirCacheReader were somewhat out of sync with
regard to which directory is ready for display in the tree view.

- 2016-01-30

- Added a context menu for the tree view header. It's still very limited, but
you can now turn off auto-resizing of the tree columns for the current
session.

- Added a .desktop file so QDirStat should now show up in the menu of the
major desktop environments (KDE, GNOME, Xfce, Unity, ...) and in their file
managers' "Open With" menus when you right-click a directory.

- 2016-01-29

- Since the missing tabs in the config dialog will also have a list of things
at the left and details of the one current item of those things at the
right, I tried to move out the common part of this as a base class. Since
the things those config tabs manage have different types, I tried a C++
template class. But **it turns out that in this year 2016 Qt's moc still
does not support templates. WTF?!**

- 21:00 (Grrrr) Okay, I found a workaround, albeit a pretty ugly one: Work
with void pointers and forced type casts. Yuck. That's being bombed back to
the early 1990s - we had to do this kind of stuff back with OSF/Motif in
plain C all the time. Type safety was unknown back then; you could get all
kinds of nasty surprises by casting pointers slightly wrong, and the
compiler had no chance (even if it hadn't been that crappy SunOS C
compiler, but a decent GCC) to catch any of this.

25 years later, and we are still stuck with that kind of stone age
programming - just because some tool never got ported to the 21st
century. Sigh.

Yet another day of development completely wasted due to insufficiencies of
underlying tools. Just great. I am getting fed up with this.

- 2016-01-22

- Improved usability of refreshing the tree after cleanup actions: They used
to leave the tree behind with nothing selected, the branch the user just
worked in closed (which is natural since it needed to be re-read from disk)
and scrolled to another position - maximum disorientation for the user. Now
the parent directory is selected, giving at least some hint where the
action took place. It's not optimal yet, but much better than before.

- Improved usability of the tree widget: When an item in the treemap is
selected, all other branches in the tree are now collapsed before the new
branch is opened. But this required working around some design flaws in the
underlying _QTreeView_ class.

**Rant:** Trolls, didn't it ever occur to you that if you are _constantly_
using that _d->expandedIndexes_ from _QTreeViewPrivate_ in the _QTreeView_
public class, derived widgets might need that information, too? There is
**no way** to access the currently expanded items other than cheating in
some creative way. Seriously, I am not going to duplicate that bookkeeping
with the _expanded()_ and _collapsed()_ signals, always being off by some
items or not getting the information that items were removed (or listen to
half a dozen more signals for even more advanced bookkeeping). If a widget
class cannot provide that kind of elementary information to its derived
classes, it's poorly designed. Period.

- 2016-01-18

- Applied Qt4 compatibility patches from Michael Matz. The only nontrivial
issue was a thin wrapper around QProcess to make it store the program to
execute and its arguments in the constructor and use those later with a
plain start() without any more arguments.

- 2016-01-16

- The MIME categories and the corresponding treemap colors can now be
configured - see screenshot above. Yes, this is a real treemap widget as a
preview for the colors, complete with a demo directory tree with a random
number of files with random sizes (i.e. it looks different for each
invocation). That part was the last major feature that was missing; now
it's only little stuff that's left (still quite a number of it, though).

- Treemap colors are now no longer fixed; there is now a rules engine called
MimeCategorizer. It uses a new class MimeCategory that groups MIME types
(by filename, not by magic numbers in the file) into broad categories like
"Documents", "Videos", "Music", "Images". Each of these categories has a
list of filename extensions that belong to it (".mp4", ".wmv", ".mov"
etc. for "Videos", for example). The categorizer uses a very fast lookup
map for the vast majority of the rules (simple file extensions), but it
can also use more powerful wildcards wherever you like them.

- The log file is now created per user: It's now /tmp/qdirstat-$UID.log,
which for most Linux home users (with only one user account on the
machine) is typically /tmp/qdirstat-1000.log .

- 2016-01-15

- Added new macros for use within cleanups: %terminal and %filemanager. They
are expanded to the terminal window or file manager application,
respectively, of the current desktop (KDE, GNOME, Xfce, ...). I just
wasted four hours (that could have been put to better use adding missing
features - grrrr) because KDE's konsole misbehaves in every way possible
(leading today's WTF count with 3):

- It won't let me start it in the background from within QDirStat; it
simply exits. I tried all kinds of command line arguments (--nofork,
--hold), I tried to wrap it into a subshell, into the _nohup_ command -
nothing helped. WTF?

- It exits when QDirStat exits. Well, since it won't let me start it in the
background, that's not too surprising. Still, if it does its own fork(),
WTF?

- It doesn't give a damn about the current directory you start it from, it
needs its --workdir command line argument. WTF?

- Added %d macro for cleanups: This is the directory name with full path. For
directories, this is the same as %p. For files, this is their parent
directory's %p.

- %terminal : Terminal window application of the current desktop; one of

- konsole
- gnome-terminal
- xfce4-terminal
- lxterminal
- eterm
- xterm (fallback)

- %filemanager : File manager application of the current desktop; one of

- konqueror
- nautilus
- thunar
- pcmanfm
- xdg-open (fallback)

- Which desktop is used is determined by the _$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP_
environment variable. Currently supported:

- KDE
- GNOME
- Unity
- Xfce
- Lxde
- Enlightenment
(no clue how to start its file manager, though - using xdg-open here)

- Users can override this with the _$QDIRSTAT_DESKTOP_ environment variable,
so you can get, say, the Xfce terminal or file manager despite currently
running KDE if you set

export QDIRSTAT_DESKTOP="Xfce"

- Of course, you can still simply use your favourite file manager if you
simply use its command instead of %filemanager in the default "Open File
Manager Here" cleanup action.

- Added new standard cleanup actions:

- Git clean. Start "git clean -dfx" in the current item's directory. This
is relevant for developers or for people who regularly build software
from Git repositories.

- Clear directory contents. This removes everything inside a directory, but
leaves the directory itself intact. ~/.thumbnails or browser cache
directories are typical candidates for this with their ever-growing
content: You probably want to keep the directory, but get rid of
everything inside it.

- Redefined the semantics of the _file manager_ cleanup action: It no longer
tries to open files with the corresponding application depending on MIME
type, it now always opens a file manager in that directory (which can open
the file in its app if you want that). It's now also renamed to "open file
manager here". If you still want the old behaviour, you can easily add your
own cleanup action with the "xdg-open %p" command.

- Added "Troubleshooting" section in this document.

- Cleanup actions that have an icon are now added to the tool bar. Right now,
only some of the predefined actions have an icon. There is currently no way
for the user to specify an icon for a cleanup action.

- 2016-01-13 Added "move to trash", this time as a normal action in the "Edit"
menu, the toolbar and the context menus. This is a real implementation of the
XDG Trash specification. It does not rely on outside tools that might or
might not be available.

- 2016-01-12 We have a first MacOS X port! Sonja Krause-Harder volunteered to
install a Qt development environment (11 GB! Yikes!) on her MacBook. I would
have expected some changes, but a simple "qmake; make" just did the
job. Amazing! -- The major challenge was to find where "qmake" gets installed
in that MacOS Qt environment.

- 2016-01-10 Went through the old KDirStat changelog and found a few bugs that
I had fixed there -- and promptly repeated with the new QDirStat:

- Disable cleanups while reading directories. This would result in a segfault.

- No longer showing the path of the current directory being read. This sped
up reading /usr on my machine from 9.5 sec to 1.5 sec (!).

- 2016-01-09 Cleaned up this README.md file. It had grown much too long.

- 2016-01-08 Cleanups are now configurable - see screenshot.

- Cleanup actions can now be added, deleted, and moved up or down the list.
There is no longer a hard limit to the number of cleanup actions; create as
many as you like. Of course, your screen size is still the limit for those
menus. ;-)

- In addition to the old cleanup parameters, you can now configure the output
window behaviour. The default is "show after timeout" with a timeout of
half a second. This may sound pretty short, but I started with 3 seconds
and found that it felt sluggish. A modern PC can get a lot of things done
in half a second; yet waiting for more than that feels like an eternity. So
if any action takes longer than that, an output window pops up. Of course,
if there is any error, it pops up anyway.

- You can now configure the shell to use. I was weighing the pros and cons of
always using either /bin/sh or the user's login shell, and I found that
there is no killer argument in favour or against either option. For
example, I use the _zsh_, and while it's a great interactive shell, it did
give me problems for that "remove junk files" cleanup: "rm -f *.o *.bak *~"
-- when any of the wildcards cannot be expanded because there is no such
file, it complains. Okay, you can wrap the whole command in "/bin/bash -c",
but that's yet another indirection, so now you can configuare /bin/bash for
that particular cleanup action. On the other hand, for some things I might
want my original shell environment, so I do want my login shell by default.
This is now the default behaviour: Try $SHELL (the user's login shell), and
if that environment variable is not set or whatever is set there is not
executable, it falls back to /bin/bash and then /bin/sh. And you can still
enter your own in an editable combo box (but not "ruby" or "perl" because
the "-c" option is still added automatically).

- 2016-01-05 I admit I had never really liked the way the output of cleanup
actions was typically hidden. Most of the times I couldn't care less, but
sometimes there were error messages that mostly went unnoticed - such as no
permissions to convert a directory into a compressed tarball. Now we have
something new: A process watcher window that looks very much like a terminal
window. The commands and their output are displayed there: Normal output
(stdout) in amber, error output (stderr) in red. It will be configurable for
each individual cleanup action if this window is desired: You can choose to
always open it, to not open it at all -- or to have it automatically open
when there is any output on stderr. And there is also a checkbox to
automatically close it when the cleanup process finishes successfully. This
is all not 100% perfect yet, but it works quite well already.

- 2016-01-04 Cleanups are back. They still need some work, and you'll have to
edit the config file in ~/.config/QDirStat/QDirStat.conf to configure
anything, but they work.

- 2016-01-03 We are getting nearer to the target:

- Settings are read from and written to the settings file in all relevant
places. This includes what columns to display and their order. See section
'Settings' below.

- Refreshing the selected tree branch, continuing reading at mount points and
at excluded directories now works.

- Context menus are back. I am somewhat proud of the way my new ActionManager
handles that with Qt introspection to avoid duplicating stuff: I wanted to
keep the QActions in the Qt Designer file. That ActionManager keeps a
pointer to the MainWindow that is the parent of all those QActions, and
attached views can search that widget tree for action names (yes, that
works only if you keep those QObject names tidy - which I am doing anyway).

- Found some more icons for those actions.

- Exclude rules are now greatly simplified. They no longer get the entire
path to match which requires quite complex regexps, they only get the last
path component - i.e., no longer "/work/home/sh/src/qdirstat/src/.git", but
only ".git". You can now even tell the exclude rule to use a simplfied
syntax: "FixedString" or "Wildcard" in addition to the normal "RegExp".

- Still missing (this list is getting considerably shorter):
- Cleanups
- Settings dialog

- 2016-01-01 New Year release
- Added mouse operations to the treemap. Some where there in the old kdirstat
(but I guess not many users knew about them), some are new:

- Left click: Select item and make it the current item.
- Ctrl+Left click: Add item to selection or toggle selection.
- Middle click: Select the current item's parent. Cycle back at toplevel.
- Double click left: Zoom treemap in.
- Double click middle: Zoom treemap out.
- Mouse wheel: Zoom treemap in or out.

- Reliably sort by pending read jobs while reading.

- Fixed crashes if wildly clicking in the tree while reading. Yes, I
know... "Doctor, it hurts when I do that!" - "Then don't do that."

- 2015-12-31 New Year's Eve release

- Added the URL of the current item in the status bar at the bottom of the
main window. If more than one item is selected, it displays the total sum
of all selected items there.

- Treemap zoom in / out / zoom reset works. The treemap now automatically
zooms out if an item outside its current scope is clicked in the tree view.

- Added more menu and toolbar actions and icons for many of them.

- The treemap's red "current item" rectangle is now stippled instead of a
solid line if the current item is not also selected (users can do that with
ctrl-click).

- Added "about" dialogs for the program and the used Qt version.

- 2015-12-30 Treemap rendering now works as expected, and selecting items
(including multi-selection with shift-click and ctrl-click in the
tree view and ctrl-click in the treemap view) works. It was a bit
of a challenge to avoid Qt signal ping-pong between the selection
model object and the two views.

- 2015-12-28 Treemaps are back. It's not perfect yet, but the basic rendering
works. I admit I was somewhat scared of that part, but the
transition from Qt3 QCanvas to QGraphicsScene / QGraphicsView
went much smoother than I had expected. I am very glad I don't
have to dig deep into the math again with those cushioned
treemaps; that part worked completely unchanged. :-)

- 2015-12-27 The tree view now supports _extended_ selection, i.e. you can
shift-click to select a range of items or ctrl-click to select or
deselect individual items. This was the most requested feature
for the last KDirStat. This means you can now select more than
one item at once to move it to the trash can etc. (once cleanup
actions are back).

- 2015-12-25 Christmas release

- Sorting is now done internally in the DirTreeModel, and it's blazingly
fast. It uses lazy sorting - postponing sorting until the last possible
moment for each tree branch. Maybe the branch will never get visible, and
then it doesn't need to be sorted at all. The QSortProxyModel is gone.

- Reading cache files finally works again. It was quite some hassle to find
all the places where the invisible root item that is required for the
QTreeView / QAbstractItemModel make a difference. I hope now I caught all
of them.

- Fixed some bugs that resulted in segfaults. Well, it's a development
version. Such things happen.

- Removed the section about K4DirStat in this README.md; that information was
outdated. It turns out I hadn't looked at the most recent sources of
K4DirStat - that was entirely my own stupidity. My apologies. Since right
now I don't have an informed opinion about K4DirStat, I preferred to remove
that section entirely for the time being. Looks like K4DirStat is indeed
ported to Qt5 now.

- 2015-12-20 First usable preview version - see screenshot above. It's still
pretty rough, and sorting via the QSortProxyModel seems to be
awfully slow once a number of tree branches were ever
opened. Looks like I'll have to do that myself, too.

- 2015-12-18 Found the crippling bugs that made the DirTreeModel do crazy
things. None of the Qt classes proved to be helpful to find that
- they just happily do the crazy things. That's what I call poor
design. Now there is a first working QDirStat with a useful
display tree, including icons (but no percentage bar graph yet).

- 2015-12-07 First working DirTreeModel -- still minimalistic, but working.

- 2015-12-06 Created tree model based on QAbstractItemModel.
Compiles, but dumps core so far.

- 2015-12-05 Imported and ported directory tree data classes.
Hammered through the compiler, but nothing usable so far.

- 2015-11-28 QDirStat project is being set up. Nothing usable so far.

## KDirStat

KDirStat is the predecessor to QDirStat. QDirStat is an 80% rewrite of the KDE3
based KDirStat.

KDirStat home page: http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/

Sources: https://github.com/shundhammer/kdirstat

### KDirStat History

_(Incomplete list, just highlighting important releases)_

- 2006-06-01 KDirStat 2.5.3: The last KDE3 based version.

- 2006-01-08 KDirStat 2.5.2:

- New: Read and write cache files

- 2005-02-22 KDirStat 2.4.4

- New: Handle hard links and sparse files

- 2003-01-30 KDirStat 2.3.5

- New: colored treemap

- 2003-01-05 KDirStat 2.3.3

- New: Treemaps (monochrome only)

- Communication between treemap and tree list view: Select an item in one
view, and it is automatically selected in the other one, too.

- 2002-02-25 KDirStat 2.0.0

- Complete rewrite for KDE 2 / Qt 2

- Doing internal caching and (very) lazy creating of QListViewItems for
improved performance and resource consumption

- 2000-01-21 KDirStat 0.86 for KDE 1 announced -- the first public version.

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