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<!--
SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2021 Yoran Heling <projects@yorhel.nl>
SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
-->
# ncdu-zig
## Description
Ncdu is a disk usage analyzer with an ncurses interface. It is designed to find
space hogs on a remote server where you don't have an entire graphical setup
available, but it is a useful tool even on regular desktop systems. Ncdu aims
to be fast, simple and easy to use, and should be able to run in any minimal
POSIX-like environment with ncurses installed.
## This Zig implementation
This branch represents an experimental rewrite of ncdu using the [Zig
programming language](https://ziglang.org/). It is supposed to be fully
compatible (in terms of behavior, UI and CLI flags) with the C version, so it
can eventually be used as a drop-in replacement.
Since Zig itself is still very much unstable and things tend to break with each
release, I can't in good conscience publish this rewrite as a proper release of
ncdu (...yet). I intent to maintain the C version as long as necessary while
Zig matures and gets more widely supported among Linux/BSD systems.
This rewrite is a test-bed for various improvements to the design of ncdu that
would impact large parts of its codebase. The improvements may also be
backported to the C version, depending on how viable a proper Zig release is.
### Improvements compared to the C version
- Significantly reduced memory usage, achieved by:
- Removing pointers between nodes that are not strictly necessary for basic
tree traversal (this impacts *all* code in the C version of ncdu).
- Using separate structs for directory, file and hard link nodes, each storing
only the information necessary for that particular type of node.
- Using an arena allocator and getting rid of data alignment.
- Refreshing a directory no longer creates a full copy of the (sub)tree.
- Improved performance of hard link counting (fixing
[#121](https://code.blicky.net/yorhel/ncdu/issues/121)).
- Add support for separate counting hard links that are shared with other
directories or unique within the directory (issue
[#36](https://code.blicky.net/yorhel/ncdu/issues/36)).
- Faster --exclude-kernfs thanks to `statfs()` caching.
- Improved handling of Unicode and special characters.
- Key to switch to path from a file's hard link listing.
- Remembers item position when switching directories.
Potentially to be implemented:
- Faster --exclude-pattern matching
- Multithreaded scanning
- Exporting a JSON dump after scanning into RAM
- Transparent dump (de)compression by piping through gzip/bzip2/etc
### Regressions compared to the C version
Aside from this implementation being unfinished:
- Assumes a UTF-8 locale and terminal.
- No doubt somewhat less portable.
- Listing all paths for a particular hard link requires a full search through
the in-memory directory tree.
- Not nearly as well tested.
- Directories that could not be opened are displayed as files.
- The disk usage of directory entries themselves is not updated during refresh.
### Minor UI differences
Not sure if these count as improvements or regressions, so I'll just list these
separately:
- The browsing UI is not visible during refresh or file deletion.
- Some columns in the file browser are hidden automatically if the terminal is
not wide enough to display them.
- The file's path is not displayed in the item window anymore (it's redundant).
- The item window's height is dynamic based on its contents.
## Requirements
- Zig 8.0
- Some sort of POSIX-like OS
- ncurses libraries and header files
## Install
**todo**
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