WinDirStat logo with textLatest version: 1.1.2

Background and history

When in 2003 I came across the KDE program KDirStat (kdirstat.sourceforge.net), I was fascinated and enthusiastic about it, as it is probably the same with many others. I had been thinking of writing a disk usage tool before, and saw: that's it!

SequoiaView (http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview/) was around, but KDirStat's concept of coupling a tree list view with a treemap was unrivaled, and I didn't find anything equivalent for MS Windows. So I wrote WinDirStat, using Mark Bruls, Kees Huizing, Jarke J. vanWijk, and Huub van de Wetering's papers on squarified treemaps (www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/stm.pdf) and cushion treemaps www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/ctm.pdf).

I didn't worry to much about the functionality but simply cloned KDirStat. The pacman is not my idea, the extension list is. I tried to size and position each GUI element optimally and to avoid modal dialogue boxes. The program should output much information while requiring few user input. When I thought it was complete, I gave it to my sister and watched her interaction with the software. That gave me another two weeks of work to do. This procedure, together with the testplan, secured WinDirStat's quality.

Meanwhile, a colleague of mine wrote Disc Inventory X (www.derlien.com/), a clone for Mac OS X.

That's the story so far. Oliver has taken responsibility for the project, many translations have been contributed. I've largely switched to Linux and observe WinDirStat's amazing download numbers. I hope we can provide some new version slowly but surely.

Bernhard

WinDirStat is Open Source software. You can redistribute and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Public License, version 2 (GPLv2).
Page last updated: 2024-01-28 20:54Z