DiskUsageForWindows

January 19, 2009
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cLabs Disk Usage for Windows (clduw) is a utility I wrote in Delphi[1] a number of years ago for finding where all your disk space has gone. I still use it fairly regularly (though there are many alternatives out there these days) and have just put up with its cruftiness: mainly, that it doesn't background thread the disk scanning so the thing just hangs there.

After being pinged this week by a user (howdy Olav!) who was rightly complaining about another bit of cruftiness (improper sorting of Int64 data), I decided to get off my duff.

What's been done so far (build 57):

- fixed the sorting bug on really big numbers
- added background threading of disk scanning, with regular update of UI as it searches
- when the list view has focus, the Enter key no longer triggers the Refresh button but instead will drill down into the selected directory in the list
- backspace shortcut key for going up a directory
- default sort order is now disk space used, descending
- added File | Open... option to browse to a directory to scan
- additional keyboard shortcuts for existing functions (e.g. Ctrl+E to explorer the current folder)
- A new “Maximize Height” view option. Maximizing the whole form is still an option, but having such a huge gap of white space between the directory name column and the other columns is not very usable, so now you can just maximize the height (F11 shortcut) to get as much of the list visible without losing the proximity of the column data.
- If there's an error message from Windows trying to scan a folder, its message is now displayed next to the folder's name.




[1] Alas, poor Delphi. You served me well in years past, but you're just too constricting a language and IDE to work in these days compared to Java/Eclipse and C#/VisualStudio/R#. (Granted, I'm still only using the free 2006 Turbo edition (is there a later free version?)). Adding threading was a bit too much work compared to these other languages.

tags: ComputersAndTechnology