easy way for users to get an overview of exactly how their disk space is being used in a given folder

[williamstein]

In every operating system, it's standard to use some sort of tool to figure out how you're using up your disk space, and there's often nice graphical tools for doing this. CoCalc also would benefit from something like this.

Right now, the best option is to open a Terminal (+New --> "Linux Terminal"), then type

~$ du -sch .[^.]* *

to get all usage, including a total at the bottom.

and

~$ du -ch .[^.]* * |sort -h

to get a sorted summary.

Since snapshots are not controllable by the user in cocalc, and also do NOT count against disk usage, they should get excluded. Since it's time consuming to compute their usage, it would be nice if du could exclude them as well (via a better regexp).

Even though I've been doing this sort of thing in UNIX for decades, I still can't easily remember how to get the hidden directories properly, so this would be valuable.

I don't know where in cocalc to put this. Some ideas:

• In the file explorer off to the right, next to backups, add a new button. When clicked, it would compute and display the above sort of info in a modal. Drawback: I wonder if people will just never see it. This doesn't seem very good.
• In settings, under "Project usage and quotas" there isa "Disk space" thing, which you can toggle to show more info. We could add a button in that box called "Explore how you are using disk space...". When clicked it would open a file "disk-usage.cocalc-usage" (say), which would use a new editor for the "cocalc-usage" file type. That new editor would start in the current working directory, and show a list of all files and folders, along with their usage. You could navigate to other directories. This is pretty much what typical OS's do -- have many applications for exploring disk usage. Usually these will show a pie chart (say) and let you click on a segment to zoom in on it. Or they will show rectangle packed with other rectangles, with the size breakdown (is there a nice javascript library for visualizing size of a bunch of components of a thing, like webpack's bundle analyzer does?).
• Right now the file Explorer has a column labeled "Size". If people only had files (not folders) this would already completely solve the problem, since it shows file sizes, and you can sort by file size. For folders, it only shows the number of items in a folder, not the actual size. I guess this entire problem would be solved if we enhanced the Size column to also compute folder sizes. I think that would be reasonable to do as long as it is done asynchronously (so it doesn't block showing or updating the listing), it's heavily throttled (e.g., a folder size would never get updated more than once every few minutes -- but that could confuse people). It would suck if this caused projects to get slow just to compute lots of directory sizes that nobody cares about.
• Similar to the previous item, put a checkbox right above the Size/Download/View column heading like "[ ] show folder size". When clicked, it would compute and fill in the sizes of all the folders in that directory., and instead of a folder showing "40 items" it would show "234MB; 40 items". The sizes would only be displayed if the checkbox is checked, and it would not be checked by default. The computation would also be heavily throttled to avoid excessive cpu usage, and this would be explained in a popover that appears when the mouse hovers over "[ ] show folder size".

It's not at all clear to me which of the above is a good idea.

[DrXyzzy]

Seems there are two problems, 1) where to put this in the UI and 2) back-end semantics, what info to display (all folders vs just one selected folder, on-demand vs cached info).

I like the last option best. Directory space use is provided on demand, without burdening people who rarely want it. I don't think it belongs in project settings because that page is already too cluttered.