Show HN: Duls – A bit of du, a bit of ls. Best of both

Hyper-optimized filetree inspector. Focusing on whats important, within when you want it.

A bit of du, a bit of ls. An adaptive and very fast way to analyze a filetree, starting at cwd.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/baalimago/duls/master/setup.sh | sh

Or build from source:

go install github.com/baalimago/duls@latest

Use

Very simple:

$ duls [colours]

~957 files · ~1.6 GB · ~0 lines types 65% .jpg · 29% .png · 2% (none) · 1% .pdf · 0% .jpeg · 0% .webp · +17 more entry files size share largest inside, without a row of its own ■ Pictures 910 1.0 GB 64% Screenshots 211 · 25-10-26-kappadokien.jpg ? · test 2 · kinoview-logo.png… ■ Downloads 23 574.4 MB 36% chatgpt_amd64.deb ? · Antigravity.tar.gz ? · Telegram Desktop 4 · Tiedote… ■ go ~13 ~182.6 MB ~12% ■ Documents ~4.1k ~154.2 MB ~10% ■ Recordings 4 533.0 kB <1% meetings 4 ■ bin 17 38.8 kB <1% record-meeting ? · meeting ? · goal-loop ? · sandbox ? · tools 8 · worklo… ■ snap 2 3.7 kB <1% libreoffice 2 · android-studio 0 · firefox 0 · firmware-updater 0 · gimp … ■ +10 smaller 0 0 B 0% partial: walk deadline 2s · not scanned 957

What it counts

duls stays on the filesystem of the directory it inspects. A mount below it, such as /proc, /sys, /run, a tmpfs /tmp or a second disk, is not entered: its entries belong to that filesystem, so every total above it is a lower bound and the footer counts it as other filesystems N. That keeps a virtual file's apparent size out of the view: /proc/kcore reports 128 TiB and stores nothing.

Sizes are apparent bytes, the size the filesystem reports for a file, so they compare with du --apparent-size -x. Hidden entries are left out unless --all is set and du counts them, so pass -a to compare like for like; on a developer machine .git, .cache and .local are most of the tree. A line count comes from a second pass over the files the view can show, bounded by -t.

df answers a different question: it counts the blocks the whole device allocates, including what no walk can reach. That is directories this user may not read, mounts the walk leaves, the filesystem's own tables, and space no name holds any more. When a run cannot reach the whole tree it states the device beside its own totals, so the difference is visible instead of missing: filesystem 281.0 GB used of 501.8 GB. duls prints SI bytes, so this figure is about 7 % larger than df -h's GiB column.

The flags that change what duls shows or how long it takes. Run duls -h for the complete list.

AGENTS.md is the developer guide and architecture/ holds the contract, one concern per file. One solid rule:

make qa # lint plus the full Go test suite

must pass with exit code 0.

MIT, see LICENSE. The view, the palette, and the presentation are extracted from slivingdoc by the same author.