gdu Is A Fast Console Disk Usage Analyzer (Alternative To ncdu, du, Etc.)

gdu is a new console disk usage analyzer developed with speed in mind. It's written in Go, and available for Linux, macOS and Microsoft Windows.

gdu (Go Disk Usage) is very similar to ncdu, a popular console disk usage analyzer, with one major difference: speed. gdu makes use of parallel processing, being especially created for solid state drives (SSD). It also works with hard disk drives (HDD), but its performance gain compared to other tools is not so great in this case.

The gdu developer has a benchmark section on the tool's project page which notes that gdu was able to scan 80G of data on a 500 GB SSD (without cache) in 6.5 seconds, while ncdu was able to do the same in 54 seconds. Here's a screenshot of more benchmarks, comparing gdu with du, nnn, and more:

As for options, gdu doesn't pack that many. It can show all mounted disks (running gdu with no arguments), analyze a directory (gdu /path/to/directory), write errors to a log file (-log-file=/path/to/log/file), ignore directories (-ignore-dir=/sys,/proc for example), and use only white / gray / black colors (-no-color).

gdu usage:

Up or k to move cursor up
Down or j to move cursor down
Enter, Right or l to select directory / device
Left or h to go to parent directory
d to delete selected file or directory
n to sort by name (asc/desc)
s to sort by size (asc/desc)
c to sort by items (asc/desc)

Download gdu (Go Disk Usage)

The tool is available on AUR (Arch Linux / Manjaro), Brew and Snap. There are also Linux, macOS and Windows binaries available on the releases page. [[Edit]] There's now also a gdu DEB package for Debian / Ubuntu-based Linux distributions.