andy.boot

Andy Boot is an independent developer who maintains Dust, a command-line disk-usage utility written in Rust that re-imagines the traditional Unix du tool for modern workflows. Instead of scrolling through kilobyte counts, Dust draws an instant, color-coded treemap in the terminal: directories are listed in descending size order and paired with bar graphs that make it obvious where storage is being consumed. The program respects .gitignore rules, skips networked filesystems on request, and can depth-limit or pattern-filter its walk, so a single invocation such as “dust -d 3 ~/Projects” produces a concise, navigable summary of the three largest directory levels. Typical use-cases range from housekeeping on crowded SSDs—finding forgotten virtual-machine images or node_modules folders—to routine DevOps checks on headless servers where a graphical disk-analyzer is unavailable. Because the binary is self-contained and cross-compiled for Windows, macOS, and Linux, it drops into CI pipelines, Docker containers, or portable toolkits without further dependencies. Users appreciate the near-instant results on multi-terabyte volumes and the option to pipe JSON output to downstream scripts. Dust is available for free on get.nero.com, delivered through trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always installing the latest upstream build and supporting batch installation alongside other utilities.