Instead of du: dust

Why dust is better

• Output is sorted by size and drawn as a tree with bars, so the biggest folders stand out without piping through sort.
• It shows only as many entries as fit your terminal by default, and -n and -d limit the count and depth.
• Each bar shows the share of its parent, so you can see that half a project lives in one subfolder.
• It installs as a single binary on Linux, macOS and Windows.

When to keep du

Keep du in scripts, monitoring jobs and anywhere you need exact numbers in a stable format. du is specified by the Single UNIX Specification and installed everywhere.

Switching

Install dust and run it in the directory you care about. There is nothing to configure. The Cargo package is du-dust, and on Fedora and some Debian tools it is packaged under that name too.

Watch out

The snap package can only read files under /home. dust is a viewer, so it cannot delete anything; dua's interactive mode can. Sizes are rounded for display, so use du when you need exact byte counts.

Also worth a look

• dua A parallel disk usage analyser with an interactive mode (dua i) for browsing and deleting; pick it when you want to clean up, not just look.

More newer, better command-line tools

• grep →, use ripgrep
• find →, use fd
• cat →, use bat
• ls →, use eza
• cd →, use zoxide
• diff →, use delta
• sed →, use sd
• curl →, use xh
• htop →, use btop
• Make →, use just
• man pages →, use tldr pages