Filelight is one free, open source, analyst files and one hard disk space, for Linux and Windows operating systems.
What do you do when your storage is exhausted? space on your disk? You must perform a disk cleanup. Filelight will help you in this clearing, finding for you which idiots take up a lot of space and giving you an analysis of your disk in the form of a pie.
The Filelight is a KDE application which was officially ported to Windows as well. THE screen Filelight's launch screen displays a circle for each hard drive and partition. The colored part of the ring shows the used space and the white areas indicate the free space on the disk drive. Hover over the colors to see storage information in Gigabytes.
Clicking on one of the rings starts a scan of the selected drive. A nice pie-shaped motion appears, which also acts as an indicator of progress.
Press the stop button on the toolbar (stop) to cancel the scanning process. You can also analyze the storage space used by a folder (and subfolders) using the open button on the toolbar. A third way to perform a scan is by using the address bar at the top of the screen.
The time required to complete the scan depends on various factors such as the total storage capacity of the drive, the amount of used space and also the read speed of the drive. When the scan is complete, you will see a set of colorful concentric rings. This is the file map. Each color represents various folders, while gray represents archives.
Placing the pointer over a ring (section) displays name of the folder that represents the total disk size of this directory. Moving the cursor from an envelope (inner ring) to the outer one shows the details of the subfolders it contains. This way, you can quickly find out what takes up a lot of storage space.
Click on any folder or subfolder to see its own set of rings. Use the back, forward, or up buttons (also available from the menu) to navigate between views. Optionally, you can use the Zoom In and Zoom Out options under the View menu to increase or decrease the view. The rescan option can be useful when you move something to a different directory and want to see the results of your current storage.
Right-click on a folder ring to open it in File Manager (Explorer) or to open a command window in the selected location. Left-click on a file to open it with its default program. This is useful if you want to preview it before you decide to delete it.
Filelight only runs on a 64-bit architecture and is available in standalone form like all KDE programs in Binary Factory portal. It is also available in the Windows Store. The versions are identical, except that the Store version is further back in the updates.
The users Linux can install it via KDE Discover. If you don't have it, run the following command in the terminal:
sudo apt install plasma-discover
Then you can install Filelight or others applications KDE in your distribution.
Filelight is not the only software for analyzing disk space. There are others, such as WizTree or SpaceSniffer for example, but it offers a better visual representation of used storage space and in that sense is much more user friendly.