Flashes of Panic

It is accepted wisdom that the best software utilities come from some hacker wanting a tool they couldn’t find, and wanting it badly enough to write it themselves. If only I had the time, because I have a want-it-badly utility.

My hard disk is pretty full, which is not a shock, considering the vast quantities of JPEGs in multiple resolutions, SWFs, DCRs, and PPTs I burn to CDs in a given month (not to mention all the PDFs to upload to the web.) There are all kinds of utilities to tell me how full the drive is. There are even some Unix command-line utilities for showing disk use by directory, like du. Like most command-line utilities, du has to be carefully instructed, or it gives you either too much information, or not enough.

I’d like a utility which tells me where to look for disk space to reclaim. That could mean either documents to archive, burn, and delete, or apps I’m not using, or whatever. So I’d want to be able to start at any given directory (the root, by default) and see a pie chart of how much disk space is being used by each directory. I’d like to be able to mouse over the chart to see which slice goes to which directory. From there I could either go another layer up the tree (show all grand-child directories of the root directory) or click a slice of the chart to repeat the process with that directory as the new root. And maybe I could command-click on the slice to have that directory opened up so I can see the files and make save-or-delete decisions.

Basically, I want to be able to visualize the data from du and have shortcuts to act on it.

I could make it even more frilly by allowing a user to create classifications (like “save”, “delete”, “archive and delete”, etc.) and assign them to slices of the pie chart, allowing them to perform disk-space triage on their entire disk, and see what they’ve already looked at vs. what still needs to be considered.

I know this is possible. (There used to be something like this for the Classic Mac OS, called Disk Surveyor, but it clearly never made the jump to OS X.) I even know the tools to create such a thing are available. What I lack is the time to (learn how to) do it.

Now Playing: Rain Song from Revenge Of The Goldfish by Inspiral Carpets