FSfsfod·Jul 11, 2024
There is a fork of Windirstat that also reads the NTFS MFT as well https://github.com/ariccio/altWinDirStat
In Show HN: Dut – a fast Linux disk usage calculatorariccio
altWinDirStat
C++2017–2024
ariccio / altWinDirStat
altWinDirStat
An unofficial modification of WinDirStat
8Distinct people
8Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
631GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
An unofficial modification of WinDirStat
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year8 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-02-06 15:42:37 UTC to 2024-07-11 15:46:08 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
8 sourcesWizTree is famously almost 50x faster than WinDirStat (on normal Windows NTFS drives) by reading the Master File Table (MFT) instead of walking the tree to measure each file.
WizTree isn't open-source like WinDirStat but "free as in beer" with optional donations.
There's also a fork of WinDirStat patched to read the MFT but I don't know anyone who's tried it: https://github.com/ariccio/altWinDirStat
In WinDirStat – Windows Directory StatisticsThe author's views on code seem rather opinionated in general. Their thoughts on internationalization in particular go against all best practices in the pursuit of clean code dogma: https://github.com/ariccio/altWinDirStat/tree/master/WinDirS...
I'm amused that the author rants about the importance of being able to easily analyze code and then wants to produce (presumably) a different binary per language to analyze all over.
Their commit messages are also rather colorful. This is an interesting project, but seemingly not someone I'd enjoy working with.
In AltWinDirStatI've also been using WizTree for quite a while, but recently learned WinDirStat scans the filesystem instead of trusting the NTFS metadata because it can sometimes be incorrect(?) and is a bit tricky due to poor documentation.
The WDS developer actually addressed this in AWDS's issues 4[1] and 19[2] a few years ago, and even said he's contemplating supporting the MFT but it seems he hasn't gotten around to it.
1: https://github.com/ariccio/altWinDirStat/issues/4#issuecomme...
2: https://github.com/ariccio/altWinDirStat/issues/19#issuecomm...
In AltWinDirStatSome may find this interesting: https://github.com/ariccio/altWinDirStat/issues/4
In AltWinDirStatI would suspect it works in a similar fashion to this[1] modification of WinDirStat, which parses the MFT to do rapid scanning, but loses the ability to selectively refresh parts of the tree.
It is, however, F/OSS.
[1] - https://github.com/ariccio/altWinDirStat
In QDirStat – Treemap Visualization of Directory StatisticsThere's a fork of windirstat here: https://github.com/ariccio/altWinDirStat
It's had most of the functionality ripped out, but it's been optimised to run blazingly fast.
In Where has my disk space gone? Flame graphs for file systems