🦆 nestscan — Pretty Directory Trees in One Command

"Because sometimes you just need to see what's actually in a folder without losing your mind."

🚀 Install

pip install nestscan

⚡ Usage

Navigate to any folder and run:

nestscan

It prints a clean, readable tree of your current directory — sorted, structured, color-coded, and easy on the eyes.

You can also point it anywhere:

nestscan /path/to/my/project

🛠 All Options

Examples

# Scan the current directory
nestscan

# Scan a specific path
nestscan /home/user/myproject

# Save output to a clean text file
nestscan -o tree.txt

# Show file sizes
nestscan --stats

# Include hidden and junk folders
nestscan --all

# Copy-paste ready output for ChatGPT, Claude, etc.
nestscan --llm

# Combine flags
nestscan /home/user/myproject --stats --all -o full_tree.txt

📋 Example Output

Directory Tree for: /home/user/myproject
==================================================
myproject/
├── src/
│   ├── main.py              [  4.2KB]
│   ├── utils.py             [  1.8KB]
│   └── models/
│       ├── user.py          [  2.1KB]
│       └── post.py          [  1.3KB]
├── tests/
│   ├── test_main.py         [  3.0KB]
│   └── test_utils.py        [  1.1KB]
├── README.md                [  2.4KB]
└── requirements.txt         [    89B]

Clean. Sorted. Directories first. Color-coded by file type.

🎨 Color Coding

✨ What It Does

• 🌲 Recursive tree generation — walks the full directory structure with proper branch characters
• 🎨 Color-coded by file type — instantly see what kind of files you're dealing with
• 📁 Directories first — folders always listed before files at every level
• 🚫 Respects .gitignore — automatically reads your .gitignore and skips what it says, plus a built-in fallback list of common junk folders
• 📊 Optional file sizes — --stats shows human-readable sizes (KB, MB, etc.) next to each file
• 🤖 LLM mode — --llm wraps the output in a code block and skips the banner so you can paste your project structure straight into an AI prompt without any cleanup
• 💾 Clean file output — when saving with -o, ANSI color codes are automatically stripped so your text file is actually readable
• 🪟 Windows compatible — ANSI colors work there too

🛠 Requirements

• Python 3.6+
• No third-party dependencies — pure stdlib, zero bloat

⚠️ Notes

• Directories you don't have permission to read will show [Permission Denied] instead of crashing
• .gitignore is parsed from the root of the scanned directory — nested .gitignore files are not currently supported
• Output is sorted alphabetically within each level, with directories always above files

🤝 Contributing

Found a bug? Have a wild idea? PRs welcome.

📜 License

Do whatever you want with it. Just stop doing ls -la and squinting at terminal output like it's 1995.

By turnt ducky 🦆 — also check out reqscan for auto-generating requirements.txt.