ncdu is short for NCurses Disk Usage. In addition to being able to visualize disk usage by directory, it lets you sort on different parameters, delete files, show hidden files, and a few more stuff that you’ll miss if you go back to plain du. Most importantly it acts as a file manager, so you can simply enter the directories to see a more fine-grained breakdown of file sizes. As an added bonus it has Vim keybindings along with normal arrow key movements.

Screenshot of ncdu + help popup

Installation:

brew install ncdu # macOS
sudo apt-get install ncdu # Ubuntu/debian

In fact, it’s anything but helpful. It won’t take help flags. It does what it’s supposed to do, but does it unsuccessfully, every time.

Even the man page tells you that. What’s false? Every time, that’s what. Hardly helpful. Hardly useful. Just … false.

It must be really hard when people expect you to be unsuccessful.

That’s the way it should be! That’s what I’m after: Transfer rates. File sizes. A proper progress bar and percent complete, with a second readout for overall progress, as needed.

Just follow the instructions on the site to apply the patch and compile coreutils. Then alias the resulting cp and mv binaries to, well, cp and mv. Make sure to add a -g flag to the aliases to get the progress bars.