July 16, 2026
Your disk space has entered the chat
Show HN: Leaves – a text-UI disk usage treemap visualizer
People are obsessed with this file-finding map and already demanding more
TLDR: Leaves is a new text-only tool that turns your folders and files into a visual map so people can spot storage hogs fast, even without a full desktop. Commenters loved the throwback feel, compared it to old favorites, and immediately started demanding Mac installs, offline mode, and custom upgrades.
A new tool called Leaves has strolled onto Show HN with a surprisingly simple promise: turn your files into a big blocky map so you can instantly see what’s eating your storage, even in a plain text window. Think of it like those classic storage-cleanup apps, but stripped down enough to work over remote connections and old-school terminals. And the community reaction? Pure nostalgia mixed with feature-envy. Multiple commenters immediately compared it to beloved classics like WinDirStat and SpaceSniffer, which is basically the nerd equivalent of being told you look like a young Brad Pitt.
The strongest vibe in the comments was: “This is cool, but now give me everything.” One person praised the navigation as “essential” and immediately started dreaming about quick actions and package-trimming powers. Another called the file-type sorting feature a “really smart addition,” treating it like the clever hack that saves the whole blocky-text idea from looking too rough. Then came the inevitable demand wave: Where’s the easy Mac install? “brew install” was requested almost instantly, because no shiny new utility is safe from the convenience crowd.
There wasn’t a full-on flame war, but there was definitely that classic Hacker News energy of polite escalation: praise, then wishlist, then someone casually announcing they might fork the project and add offline indexing themselves. In other words, the crowd likes Leaves so much they’re already trying to turn it into their personal dream app. That’s not just approval — that’s a tech community love language.
Key Points
- •Leaves is a text-mode disk usage analyzer that displays files and directories as a treemap of nested rectangles sized roughly by disk usage.
- •The tool is intended for terminal use and is positioned as useful over remote shell connections where graphical desktop environments are unavailable or impractical.
- •Users can download pre-built binaries for some platforms or build from source using a Rust toolchain, with Nix also documented as an alternative build setup.
- •Leaves can be built with `cargo build --release`, installed with `cargo install --path .`, and run either from source or as an installed binary.
- •By default, hidden files and directories and items matched by `.gitignore` or `.ignore` are skipped, but command-line options allow users to include them or refine scans with override globs.