Explore views

Every Explore view is a different projection of the same scan. None of them touches the disk: the tree, the treemap, the search and the reports all read the same SQLite index.

The eight views

View	Command	What it answers
Folders	diskgoup tree	What is inside, and how big is each folder?
Top sizes	diskgoup sizes	What is taking the most room?
File types	diskgoup types	What kind of content is it?
Treemap	diskgoup treemap	Where is the space, in proportion?
Sunburst	diskgoup sunburst	How does the space nest?
Flame	diskgoup flame	What does the hierarchy look like as an icicle?
Bubbles	diskgoup bubbles	How many distinct things share the space?
Mind map	diskgoup mindmap	What hangs off the big branches?
Age map	diskgoup age	How old is it all?

Folder tree

diskgoup tree ~/Documents --depth 3

Documents 1.2 GB · 4,120 files
├── Reports [protected] 890 MB
│   ├── 2024 612 MB
│   └── 2025 278 MB
└── Projects 310 MB

--depth controls how many levels are expanded. Protected folders are marked.

Top sizes

diskgoup sizes ~ --limit 15

╭────┬────────────────────────────┬──────────┬─────────┬────────╮
│  # │ Name                       │ Kind     │    Size │  Share │
├────┼────────────────────────────┼──────────┼─────────┼────────┤
│  1 │ Downloads                  │ other    │ 12.9 GB │ 29.1%  │
│  2 │ Library                    │ cache    │  8.4 GB │ 18.9%  │
╰────┴────────────────────────────┴──────────┴─────────┴────────╯

Folders and files are ranked together by default. Use --no-folders or --no-files to restrict the ranking to one of them.

File types

diskgoup types ~

╭───────────────┬─────────┬─────────┬────────┬────────────────────────┐
│ Type          │  Files  │    Size │  Share │ Bar                    │
├───────────────┼─────────┼─────────┼────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ ● video       │   1,204 │ 22.4 GB │ 50.4%  │ ███████████████       │
│ ● cache       │  48,120 │  9.1 GB │ 20.5%  │ ██████                 │
│ ● document    │   8,331 │  3.8 GB │  8.6%  │ ███                     │
├───────────────┼─────────┼─────────┼────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ Total         │         │ 44.5 GB │ 100.0% │                        │
╰───────────────┴─────────┴─────────┴────────┴────────────────────────╯

The order is fixed — game, video, archive, document, cache, application, audio, image, code, system, other — so two scans are comparable at a glance.

The spatial views

Five views draw the same layout in different geometries. All of them accept the same options:

Option	Default	What it does
--width	1200	Canvas width in pixels
--height	800	Canvas height in pixels
--depth	3	How many levels to expand
--output FILE	–	Write an SVG file instead of printing a table
--scan-id N	–	Read a specific scan
--rescan	off	Walk the tree again first

Treemap

diskgoup treemap ~ --output treemap.svg

Squarified rectangles: each item’s area is proportional to its size, and the layout keeps the aspect ratio of each tile close to 1 so large items stay readable instead of turning into slivers. This is the classic disk-usage picture.

Sunburst

diskgoup sunburst ~ --output sunburst.svg

Radial arcs — one ring per level of the tree. The angle of a sector is proportional to its share of the parent.

Flame

diskgoup flame ~ --output flame.svg

An icicle: depth runs down the vertical axis, cumulative size runs across the horizontal one. It reads like a flame graph, which makes the hierarchy of what contains what obvious.

Bubbles

diskgoup bubbles ~ --output bubbles.svg

One circle per leaf, sized by area and packed without overlaps. The circles are placed on a golden-angle spiral and then pushed apart, so the result is deterministic — the same scan always draws the same picture.

Mind map

diskgoup mindmap ~ --output mindmap.svg

A radial hub with straight links: the root in the middle, the big branches around it, each branch’s own subtree fanned out inside its wedge.

Age map

diskgoup age ~

╭──────────────┬─────────┬─────────┬────────┬────────────────────────┐
│ Age          │  Files  │    Size │  Share │ Bar                    │
├──────────────┼─────────┼─────────┼────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ Last 7 days  │   1,204 │  2.1 GB │  4.7%  │ █                     │
│ Last 30 days │   8,120 │  9.4 GB │ 21.1%  │ ██████                │
│ Last 3 months│  12,004 │ 14.2 GB │ 31.9%  │ ██████████            │
│ Older        │  41,220 │ 18.8 GB │ 42.3%  │ █████████████         │
╰──────────────┴─────────┴─────────┴────────┴────────────────────────┯

Seven buckets: last 7 days, 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, a year, two years, and everything older. Files whose modification time could not be read land in the oldest bucket — the honest place for them, since they are the ones most likely to be stale.

Output formats

Every view can answer in three ways:

• A table (the default) — a human-readable summary.
• JSON (--json) — the computed geometry, which is what the desktop app draws.
• An SVG (--output file.svg) — a standalone file.

diskgoup --json treemap ~ --depth 2

{
  "scan": { "scan_id": 1, "root": "/Users/you", "…": "…" },
  "view": "treemap",
  "items": [
    {
      "path": "/Users/you/Downloads",
      "name": "Downloads",
      "size": 13893660416,
      "kind": "other",
      "depth": 1,
      "color": "#6c8cff",
      "rect": { "x": 0, "y": 0, "width": 1200, "height": 800 }
    }
  ]
}

Colours

A folder is coloured by the kind that dominates its contents, not by its own name. A folder full of videos shows up as video rather than as an anonymous “other” bucket.

Kind	Colour
game	magenta
video	red
archive	yellow
document	cyan
cache	green
application	blue
audio	bright magenta
image	bright cyan
code	bright black
system	bright black
other	white