Docs / Analysis views
◫ Analysis views
DiskInsight ships with nine ways to look at your disk. They all share the same data, the same focus (breadcrumb) navigation, and the same right-click actions — so switching between them never loses context.
Choosing a visualizer
The visualizer picker lives in the window toolbar. The nine views, in order of when people usually reach for them:
Treemap — the default
Squarified rectangles sized by proportion. The biggest consumers are visible instantly. Click to zoom into a folder, click the breadcrumb or press Esc to zoom out.
Folders — the browser
A classic expandable tree with live sizes and per-column sorting. Best for methodical exploration of deep trees like ~/Library.
List view — the table
Every item under your focus in a flat, sortable, searchable table. Copy paths, multi-select, batch-stage, or reveal in Finder.
Top sizes — the leaderboard
The largest items ranked with immediate context actions. The fastest answer to “what’s biggest in here?”
Age map — the staleness detector
Colors folders by last-modified age. Spot archival directories, unused caches and years-old downloads immediately.
Sunburst — the ring chart
Your focus becomes the centre ring and its children the outer rings. Lovely for understanding one large folder’s structure.
Flame graph — the budget view
Emphasizes large, deep paths like a CPU profiler. Good for finding the long tail of one big subtree.
Bubbles — the circle pack
Circular packing of the biggest items. Readable at a glance and pleasant on very large drives.
Mind map — the branch view
Node-and-branch layout for tracing composition without losing the parent context.
The focus (breadcrumb) bar
The bar above the visualizer shows your current path. It always shows the focused folder’s size and file count. Click a crumb to jump back to that ancestor.
File type and bloat filters
Use the filters to narrow or hide content across all visualizers:
- File types — video, audio, docs, code, archives, images and more. “Hide” filters matching items out of every view.
- Bloat filters — collapse Node.js, Xcode and build-artifact trees everywhere so your real data stays visible.
Filters have no effect on the underlying data — they only change what is displayed and counted.
Logical size vs. size on disk
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Logical size | Sum of bytes reported per file — what the Finder shows as “size”. |
| Size on disk | Actual blocks allocated including APFS clones and sparse extents. |
Most Linux disk tools show one or the other; DiskInsight shows both so clones and sparse files stop lying to you.