wims — where is my space

A fast, keyboard-driven terminal UI for finding out what's eating your disk and cleaning it up.

╭ ◆ wims · where is my space ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ ▸ /Users/you/Library/Caches                                                        │
│ volume ██████████████████████████████████░░░░░ 15.0 GB free of 228 GB              │
╰────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯
╭ 2.2 GB · 133 entries · 46,987 files ───────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ ▸ com.spotify.client/               █████████░░░░░░░   1.3 GB   57.7%    37,282    │
│ ▸ pypoetry/                         ███░░░░░░░░░░░░░   361 MB   15.8%     2,421    │
│ ▸ Google/                           █░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░   160 MB    7.0%     3,050    │
│ ▸ Homebrew/                         █░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░   147 MB    6.5%     1,753    │
│ ...                                                                                │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── sort: size ╯
 Scanned 46,987 files (2.2 GB) in 0.2s
 ↑↓ move  ⏎ open  ⌫ back  d trash  D delete  s sort  r rescan  q quit

Features

• Live-updating scan — the tree is browsable the instant the app opens; entries appear and folder sizes tick upward while the parallel scan (powered by rayon) is still running.
• Visual size breakdown — every entry gets a usage bar and its share of the parent folder, heat-colored green → yellow → red so the big offenders jump out.
• Volume gauge — the header shows how full the disk holding the scanned folder is, updated after every deletion.
• Batch cleanup with undo — mark several entries with Space (or a to mark the whole folder) and clear them in one confirmed action. d moves to the Trash, D deletes permanently; both ask first. Trashed a folder by mistake? Press u to put it and everything in it back exactly where it was. On macOS, trashing uses the native NSFileManager API — no AppleScript, no automation prompts — and captures each item's Trash location so undo is reliable.
• File preview — press p to peek at a file before deciding its fate. Images are rendered as color thumbnails (works in any terminal, including the VS Code integrated terminal — no graphics protocol needed); text files (code, markdown, json, logs, …) show their first lines with line numbers. Binary formats are politely refused.
• Adapts to your terminal's colors — at startup wims asks the terminal for its background color (OSC 11, with COLORFGBG as fallback) and picks a light or dark syntax theme and selection color accordingly, so previews stay readable everywhere. Override with --light / --dark if the guess is wrong.
• Real disk usage — sizes are allocated blocks (like du), not apparent file length, so sparse files don't lie to you.
• Symlink-safe — links are never followed, so nothing outside the scanned folder is counted or deleted through a link.

Install

Requires a Rust toolchain (rustup.rs).

cargo install wims

Usage

wims [--light|--dark] [directory]

With no argument, wims scans the current directory. Scanning starts immediately and the view fills in live; the footer shows progress and switches to a summary when the scan completes.

Keys

Key	Action
↑ ↓ or k j	move selection
⏎ / → / l	open the selected folder
⌫ / ← / h	back to parent folder
g / G	jump to top / bottom
f / b or PgDn / PgUp	page down / up
Space	mark / unmark the selected entry
a	mark / unmark every entry in the folder
p	preview the selected file — image or text (any key closes)
d	move marked (or selected) to Trash (confirm with y)
D	delete marked (or selected) permanently (confirm with y)
u	undo the last trash (restores files from the Trash)
s	cycle sort: size → name → files
o	reveal the selected entry in Finder
r	rescan from scratch
q	quit
Esc	quit (press twice to confirm)

How it works

• A background thread walks the directory tree in parallel with rayon. As each directory is enumerated, its entries are streamed over a channel to the UI, which merges them into the tree between frames and propagates the new bytes up the ancestor chain — that's what makes totals grow live.
• Children are kept in arrival order; sorting is a per-frame index over the current directory, and the cursor follows the entry it's on rather than its row, so the selection doesn't jump while entries reorder mid-scan.
• Unreadable directories (permissions) are shown as empty rather than aborting the scan.
• Input is drained in batches (a trackpad flick lands in one redraw, not hundreds) and only the visible rows are built each frame, so directories with tens of thousands of entries stay smooth to scroll.

Notes

• Deleting is disabled while a scan is in progress; navigation and sorting work live. Wait for the footer summary, or press r later to rescan.
• Marks are per-folder: they belong to the directory you're in and clear when you move into or out of it. u can be pressed repeatedly to undo earlier trash actions in turn; a permanent delete (D) can't be undone.
• The view is a snapshot from scan time. If something was removed outside wims, deleting it just updates the view instead of erroring.
• Each physical object is counted once. Hard links and, on macOS, firmlinks (which make the data volume visible both at /Users, /Applications, … and again under /System/Volumes/Data) are deduplicated by inode — so scanning / reports true usage instead of roughly double. A directory reached a second way is shown but not re-counted; its bytes are attributed to whichever path reached it first.