Disk View

A small, read-only GTK4/libadwaita application written in Crystal for Linux. The interface follows your system language. Disk usage is displayed using native horizontal GTK progress bars.

Features

• Mounted local filesystems and common network mounts, including total, used, available and reserved space when reported by the filesystem.
• Unmounted disks and partitions, including their capacity. Usage cannot be determined without mounting a filesystem; Disk View does not mount devices.
• Compact drive groups (sda, sdb, NVMe, etc.) with indented partitions, physical drive capacity and aggregated filesystem usage. Partial totals are explicitly marked when some partitions cannot be measured.
• Native Adwaita expander rows start collapsed. Click a drive to reveal its partitions; your expansion choices are preserved across refreshes in the current session.
• Bind mounts and subvolumes of the same filesystem are grouped together.
• Automatic refresh every 15 seconds and a manual refresh button.
• Light and dark appearance follow the system preference, including live changes, using libadwaita's default color scheme.
• Asynchronous filesystem queries so slow network mounts do not block the UI.
• No root privileges, shell commands or charting libraries required at runtime.
• Original scalable application icon, desktop launcher and an Adwaita About dialog with author, version and license information.
• English, German, French, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Russian, Italian, Polish, Korean and Japanese translations, selected using your system locale.

Requirements

Linux, Crystal 1.20+, Shards, GTK4, libadwaita 1.5+ and GObject Introspection. Building also requires GNU gettext tools and glib-compile-resources (provided by the GLib development packages); the icon is embedded in the executable.

On Arch / Manjaro:

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel crystal shards gtk4 libadwaita gobject-introspection gettext

On Debian / Ubuntu:

sudo apt install build-essential crystal shards libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev libgirepository1.0-dev gobject-introspection gir1.2-gtk-4.0 gir1.2-adw-1 gettext

Your distribution may require installing a current Crystal compiler and Shards separately. A graphical session is required to run the application.

Run

make setup
make run

make setup downloads the Crystal bindings and generates them for your installed GTK version. Run it again after updating the dependencies or system libraries.

For the correct icon in the desktop dock/taskbar, install the application once using the user installation below. This registers the desktop entry and icon with the desktop shell, including for subsequent make run launches. The embedded icon alone is sufficient for the About dialog, but desktop shells such as GNOME on Wayland look up the application's installed desktop entry. Restart Disk View after installing it.

make build                         # Creates bin/disk-view
./bin/disk-view
make test                          # Headless discovery/parser and usage tests
crystal tool format --check src/ spec/

Use the header-bar menu for About Disk View, refresh and close. Keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+R to refresh, F1 for About, and Ctrl+W to close.

Install

Install the executable, desktop launcher and icon for your user:

make install PREFIX="$HOME/.local"

Ensure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH. For a system-wide installation use sudo make install (default prefix: /usr/local). Uninstall with make uninstall PREFIX="$HOME/.local", or sudo make uninstall respectively. Translations are installed under share/locale relative to the installation prefix. The executable needs no source files; when distributing it, include the translation catalogs to retain localized interfaces.

Releases

Download the Linux x86_64 archive from GitHub Releases. It contains the executable, all ten translation catalogs, the desktop launcher, icon and license. Extract it and run ./bin/disk-view; GTK4 and libadwaita must be installed. Keep bin/ and share/ together so translations can be found. The separate executable download uses English unless translation catalogs are also installed under the corresponding share/locale directory.

Build an optimized executable from source with:

make build CRYSTAL_FLAGS="--release --no-debug"

Translations

GNU gettext selects the interface language at startup using LANGUAGE, LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES and LANG. Unsupported languages fall back to English; the C and POSIX locales use English. The requested system locale must be installed on the machine. GTK/Adwaita also use their own system translations.

To test another language with an available UTF-8 locale:

LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=fr ./bin/disk-view
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=ja ./bin/disk-view

Close an existing Disk View instance first, since subsequent launches activate the existing application. Korean and Japanese use standard ko and ja catalog names (the same languages listed as kr and jp in Goblin Converter).

Catalog sources are in po/<language>/LC_MESSAGES/. make build and make test compile them automatically. During development, catalogs are read from po/; installed binaries find them relative to their own installation prefix.

make locales                       # Compile and validate PO → MO catalogs
make generate_locales              # Extract messages and update existing PO files

After changing translatable strings, run make generate_locales, complete the translations and run make test. Add source files containing translation calls to po/POTFILES, and add new language codes to po/LINGUAS. Translations use named placeholders such as %{size}; keep their names and escape literal percent signs as %% in formatted messages. Locale-dependent specs require an installed non-C UTF-8 locale and are marked pending if none is available.

Scope

Discovery uses /proc/self/mountinfo, /proc/swaps and /sys/class/block. Pseudo-filesystems, RAM disks and loop/Snap images are hidden. Partitions are grouped using sysfs parent relationships, with numeric partition ordering. Mapped devices (LVM, RAID, encryption) form separate groups; their underlying partitions are identified as in use, without attributing the mapped filesystem's usage to a physical device. Filesystem capacities larger than their backing partition are excluded from drive totals to avoid counting an entire storage pool as one disk's usage. A drive's percentage uses its physical capacity; unpartitioned capacity is not counted as available filesystem space. Unknown partition usage is never counted as free space. Only filesystems visible in the application's mount namespace can be listed. Capacity and occupancy are filesystem values, not directory-size estimates. The application does not scan directory trees, modify partitions or mount drives.

Author and license

Created by Matthäus J. N. Beyrle. Released under the MIT License. The application icon is original SVG artwork distributed under the same license.