dirplot 0.4.4

Nested treemap visualizations for directory trees and archives

dirplot

dirplot creates nested treemap images for directory trees. It can display them in the system image viewer or inline in the terminal (iTerm2 and Kitty protocols, auto-detected). It also animates git history, watches live filesystems, and scans remote sources.

pip install dirplot
dirplot map .          # treemap of current directory, opens in system viewer
dirplot map . --inline # display inline in terminal (iTerm2 / Kitty / Ghostty)

Where to start

I want to…	Go to
Scan a local directory or archive	Quick start
Scan a GitHub repo, S3 bucket, SSH host, or container	Remote access & examples
Scan Google Drive	Google Drive
Animate git history or watch live filesystems	Git History Animation
Use dirplot from Python	Python API
Run in Docker	Running via Docker
Fix an error	Troubleshooting

How to run dirplot

Method	Command	Notes
Installed CLI	dirplot map .	After pip install / uv tool install
No install (uv)	uvx dirplot map .	Runs the latest release ephemerally
Python API	from dirplot import build_tree, create_treemap	See API.md
Docker	docker run --rm dirplot dirplot map … --output -	See Docker

Features

• Squarified treemap layout; file area proportional to size; per-extension colours (GitHub Linguist palette for known types, configurable Matplotlib colormap for the rest).
• PNG, animated PNG (APNG), MP4, and MOV output for single frames and animations; interactive SVG for static maps; renders at terminal pixel size or a custom WIDTHxHEIGHT.
• Inline terminal display — renders directly into iTerm2, Kitty, Ghostty, WezTerm, and Warp without opening a separate window; protocol auto-detected.
• Animate git history (dirplot git), Mercurial history (dirplot hg), and replay filesystem event logs (dirplot replay) — output APNG, MP4, or MOV. Watch live filesystems (dirplot watch) with optional snapshot and event logging.
• Scan metrics (dirplot metrics) — file/dir counts, total size, depth, top extensions by count or size, largest files and directories with percentage of total; JSON output supported.
• Compare two trees (dirplot diff) — treemap diff of any two sources (local dirs, GitHub repos, archives, S3, SSH, Docker, K8s, or two commits/tags); dirplot diff . shows uncommitted changes; files sized by B; colour-coded borders show added (green), removed (red), and changed (blue) files. Git/hg repos scan only tracked files; change detection uses blob hashes (LFS-aware).
• Scan SSH hosts, AWS S3, GitHub repos (public and private), Docker containers, Kubernetes pods, and Google Drive — no extra deps beyond the respective CLI.
• Read archives directly (zip, tar, 7z, rar, jar, whl, …) without unpacking.
• Works on macOS, Linux, and Windows (WSL2 fully supported).

Installation

# Recommended: isolated tool install via uv (fastest)
uv tool install dirplot

# Alternative: pipx (install pipx first if needed: brew install pipx on macOS)
pipx install dirplot

# Into the current environment
pip install dirplot

Optional extras — install only what you need:

Extra	Enables	Install
ssh	Scan remote servers via SSH (adds paramiko)	pip install "dirplot[ssh]"
s3	Scan AWS S3 buckets (adds boto3)	pip install "dirplot[s3]"
libarchive	Additional archive formats: .tar.zst, .iso, .dmg, .rpm, .cab, … (requires system libarchive)	pip install "dirplot[libarchive]"

Other runtime requirements:

• dirplot watch — watchdog is installed automatically.
• dirplot git — requires git on PATH.
• dirplot hg — requires hg (Mercurial) on PATH.
• MP4 output (dirplot git, dirplot hg, dirplot replay) — requires ffmpeg on PATH.
• dirplot read-meta on .mp4 files — requires ffprobe (bundled with ffmpeg).

Quick start

dirplot map .                                                    # current directory
dirplot map . --inline                                           # display in terminal (iTerm2/Kitty)
dirplot map . --output treemap.png --no-show                     # save to file
dirplot map . --log-scale 4 --inline                             # log scale (4× ratio), inline
dirplot map github://pallets/flask                               # GitHub repo
dirplot map gdrive://                                            # Google Drive root (requires gog)
dirplot map docker://my-container:/app                           # Docker container
dirplot map project.zip                                          # archive file
tree src/ | dirplot map                                          # pipe tree output

dirplot git . -o snapshot.png                                    # static snapshot of HEAD
dirplot git .@v1.0 --inline                                      # inline snapshot at tag
dirplot git . -o history.mp4 --range main                        # full git history
dirplot git . -o history.mp4 --period 30d                        # last 30 days
dirplot git github://owner/repo -o h.mp4 --period 7d             # GitHub, last week

dirplot hg /path/to/repo -o history.png --range 0:tip            # full hg history
dirplot hg /path/to/repo@tip -o history.png                      # static, tip only

dirplot watch . --snapshot treemap.png                           # live watch, snapshot on each change
dirplot watch . --event-log events.jsonl                         # record events for replay
dirplot replay events.jsonl -o timelapse.mp4 --total-duration 30 # render recording as MP4

dirplot demo                                                     # run examples, save to ./demo/

dirplot metrics .                                                # scan metrics: counts, size, top extensions
dirplot metrics . --sort-by size                                 # sort extensions by total bytes
dirplot metrics . --top 5 --json                                 # top-5 entries as JSON
dirplot map . --metrics --no-show                                # treemap + metrics in one pass

dirplot diff .                                                   # uncommitted changes (git/hg)
dirplot diff . --no-context                                      # only show changed files
dirplot diff .@HEAD~5 .@HEAD                                     # last 5 commits
dirplot diff old/ new/                                           # compare two directories
dirplot diff old/ new/ --output diff.png --no-show               # save to file
dirplot diff github://owner/repo@v1 github://owner/repo@v2       # compare two GitHub tags
dirplot diff archive_v1.tar.gz archive_v2.zip                    # compare two archives

Docker — build once, then pipe output to the host:

docker build -t dirplot .
docker run --rm dirplot dirplot map github://steipete/birdclaw --output - | imgcat

Documentation

• CLI reference — all commands, flags, and usage examples
• Remote access & examples — SSH, S3, GitHub, Docker, Kubernetes, git history animation
• Archive formats — supported formats and dependencies
• Python API — programmatic usage
• Troubleshooting — common issues and fixes

Development

git clone https://github.com/deeplook/dirplot
cd dirplot
make test

See CONTRIBUTING.md for full details.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.