Why Switch to Dust? A Faster, Colorful Alternative to du for Disk Usage

Overview

Dust is a Rust‑implemented alternative to the traditional du command. It displays disk usage as a colored tree, showing each file or directory’s size and its percentage of the total.

Installation

Via Cargo: cargo install du-dust Available in most Linux distribution repositories.

macOS users can install with Homebrew or MacPorts .

Basic Usage

Run dust in a directory to get a tree view of disk usage:

$ dust
5.7M   ┌── exa               │   2%
5.9M   ├── tokei             │   2%
6.1M   ├── dust              │   2%
...

Target a specific path: $ dust ~/Work/ Reverse the order (root at the bottom) with -r: $ dust -r ~/Work/ Limit recursion depth with -d <levels>, e.g., three levels:

$ dust -d 3 ~/Work/wildfly/jaxrs/target/classes
4.0K   ┌── jaxrs.xml               │   1%
4.0K   └─┴ subsystem-templates    │   1%
...

Key Options

-r

: Reverse output order. -d <n>: Show only n directory levels.

Repository

Source code and contribution guidelines are hosted at https://github.com/bootandy/dust .