stman 0.2.0

A CLI tool for interactive disk storage analysis on Windows.

stman

Windows' built-in storage tools don't tell you much. Storage Sense shows you a pie chart, Explorer makes you right-click every folder individually. I wanted something that would actually show me where my disk space was going, all at once, fast.

stman is a CLI tool that scans your drives and directories and displays sizes in a sorted table. Navigate into any folder to see what's inside it.

Installation

pip install stman

Requires Python 3.8+ on Windows 10/11.

Usage

stman

Commands

Command	Description
goto <path>	Jump to a specific path
b	Go back one directory
top	Go to drive root
r	Refresh current view
togglex	Show/hide inaccessible folders
clearcache	Clear cached sizes
help	List all commands
exit	Quit

Benchmark Mode

stman --benchmark <path>

Runs stman's scanner against PowerShell's Get-ChildItem on the same directory (with disk cache pre-warmed for both) and reports the comparison.

Benchmarks

Benchmarking: C:\Program Files
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
  stman (C++ DLL):     0.63s
  PowerShell GCI:      14.28s
  Speedup:             22.5x
──────────────────────────────────────────────────

Benchmarking: C:\Users\glcon
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
  stman (C++ DLL):     2.06s
  PowerShell GCI:      13.54s
  Speedup:             6.6x
──────────────────────────────────────────────────

Speedup varies with directory width — wider trees give the thread pool more parallel work to distribute. C:\Program Files has many independent top-level subdirectories; C:\Users is deeper and narrower.

How it works

The scanner is a C++ DLL called via Python's ctypes FFI. It uses Win32's FindFirstFileExW with FIND_FIRST_EX_LARGE_FETCH for fast directory enumeration, and distributes subdirectories across a thread pool sized to hardware_concurrency(). The Python layer handles the CLI, caching, and display.

License

MIT