eDirStat v2.0.0 — Major 2.0 Overhaul, Direct MFT & Classic Layout

Version 2.0.0 focuses on performance optimizations, architectural hardening, and broader platform compatibility. Key updates include the integration of a Windows-native NTFS Master File Table (MFT) driver for faster scanning, a classic WinDirStat-style layout option, and headless command-line snapshot capabilities. Additionally, this release refactors several critical paths—such as transitioning snapshot persistence to a safe, Zstd-compressed format and replacing unsafe operations with compiler-optimized safe Rust—to improve reliability and resource efficiency across all supported operating systems.

The project also has a new website at: edirstat.com!

📦 Distribution Model & Project Support

eDirStat is, and will always remain, entirely open-source and free. However, to support continuous development, engineering, and maintenance costs, official pre-compiled binaries for Windows, macOS, and Linux are distributed exclusively as a paid download via Itch.io - xangelix.itch.io/edirstat.

100% Open Source: The complete codebase is free of charge and publicly available under the permissive MIT License. If you prefer to build the tool yourself, you are welcome to compile the source code on Windows, Linux, or macOS at no cost. Instructions are provided in the README.md.
Package Managers: Package managers and their repository maintainers are welcome to bundle and distribute eDirStat through their respective channels at no cost, provided that it is distributed un-paid, "unofficial", and under the MIT License.

Purchasing precompiled packages directly funds the engineering efforts required to keep eDirStat fast, secure, and compatible with the latest operating systems.

Added

Windows & NTFS Integration

🪟 Windows NTFS MFT Driver: Integrated a new Windows-native NTFS driver utilizing the Master File Table (MFT) for near-instantaneous drive scanning on Windows.
🪟 Administrator Restart Modal: Added a prompt to restart the application as administrator to allow Master File Table (MFT) access on Windows.
🪟 Windows UNC Path Stripping: Automatically strip UNC volume prefixes (such as \\?\) from directory paths in all visual components.

GUI Enhancements & Features

🗂️ WinDirStat Layout Mode: Added a brand new WinDirStat-style layout mode for a classic, familiar disk usage visualization.
☑️ Multi-Select & Multi-Operations: Added support for selecting multiple items and performing bulk operations in the GUI.
❓ "How it Works" Modal: Added an informative explanation modal to help users understand the deduplication process.
🌳 Default Root Selection: Automatically selects the root directory node upon loading, improving the initial navigation flow.
⏱️ Scan Stats Persistence: Retained the elapsed scan time and scanning speed in the status bar even after the scan has finished.
⏱️ Millisecond Scan Timing: Switched the GUI elapsed scan time to display millisecond-level precision.
📋 Clipboard Tools: Added "Copy Name" and "Copy Path" tools to easily copy file metadata from the directory tree.
🔆 Scan Button Highlight: Added a subtle glow/highlight effect to the "Scan Directory" button when no scan has been run or directory data is empty.
📊 New Table Implementation: Switched to a robust, feature-rich table view powered by egui-table-kit, supporting horizontal scrolling and cleaner row selection/operations traits.
📅 Created Time Column: Added a "Created" column in the directory tree/explorer view (positioned before "Modified") to view file creation dates.
🔄 Root Refresh Support: Restored the ability to refresh/rescan the root node directly in the directory explorer.
ℹ️ Update Checker: Added an update checker to the "About" modal to easily check for new versions of the application.
📊 Item and Directory Count Sorting: Added full support for sorting the directory explorer view by item and subdirectory counts.
🛡️ Restricted Permissions Handling: Added detection and safe handling of folders with restricted access/permissions, marking them as "No Permission" in the UI rather than failing the scan.
🔔 Toast Notifications: Integrated interactive toast notifications (success, warning, error, info) for file manager operations, terminal launching, and deduplication hardlinking/softlinking.
🎨 Squared Logo Asset: Created a new subtext-less squared SVG logo variant for keyart and promotional purposes.
⚖️ Dependency Licenses Modal: Added an open source license viewing modal inside the About dialog to display packaged licenses for dependencies.

CLI & Headless Tooling

🚀 CLI / Positional Arguments: Added support for passing a directory path as a positional command-line argument to automatically start scanning on startup.
🚀 Headless Snapshot Mode: Added a headless command-line mode to run directory scans and automatically save results to a .edst snapshot file, bypassing the GUI.

Project Infrastructure & Packaging

🍏 macOS Sandboxing Entitlements: Packaged the macOS app with proper sandboxing entitlements for improved security and smoother OS integration.
📦 Windows Installer (Inno Setup): Added support for building proper Windows setup/installer binaries (.exe via Inno Setup) in the CI/CD pipeline on every commit.
⚙️ EditorConfig: Added an .editorconfig file to establish and enforce consistent coding styles across different editors.
⚖️ MIT License: Formally initialized the repository with the MIT License.
💖 GitHub Sponsors: Added sponsor/funding configuration pointing to xangelix to support the project.
📄 Changelog: Created a clean, practical, and exciting changelog documenting all previous releases.
📊 Benchmark & Demo Media: Added comparison benchmarks against QDirStat and WinDirStat in the README, along with high-quality demonstration videos (drag race, deduplicator demo, and WinDirStat layout mode).
🛡️ Forbid Unsafe Code Directive: Added #![forbid(unsafe_code)] at both binary and library crate entry points to ensure compilation-level code safety.
📦 Multi-Target CPU Windows Runner: Integrated cargo-multivers builder to compile distinct, target-CPU optimized Windows binaries and package them inside a single wrapper crate (runner/) using multivers-runner.
⚖️ Packaged License Generation: Integrated cargo-about to generate target-specific open source license lists (assets/licenses/<target>.md) and packaged them into the binary using include_packed.

Web App & Simulator

🌐 eDirStat Web V2: Redesigned and launched the official product website (/web) featuring an interactive, live simulator for the cryptographic deduplication pipeline and treemap dashboard.
🌐 Responsive Displays & Ratios: Expanded CSS layout grids and flexbox viewport definitions to support a wide range of mobile and ultra-wide monitor aspect ratios without clipping.
🌐 Deduplicator Simulator: Built a fully client-side animated simulator of the eDirStat deduplication process, showing steps like size partitioning, header hashing, midpoint/suffix matching, and BLAKE3 checking.
🌐 Speed Multipliers: Added scanning speed multipliers comparison to the website simulator charts.
🌐 Favicon Integration: Added a website favicon referenced from assets/img/.

Developer Tooling & Testing

🛠️ Tracy Profiling: Integrated basic support for Tracy-based profiling to assist in performance diagnostics.
🧪 Typos Check CI/CD: Initialized automated spelling/typos check workflow in the CI/CD pipeline.
🧪 Criterion MFT Benchmarks: Added a benchmarking suite using criterion to measure and track Master File Table (MFT) parsing performance.
🧪 Comprehensive Test Suite: Added 55 new unit and integration tests across the codebase, significantly expanding test coverage for charts, model arena, persistence, and directory traversal.

Changed

Performance & Allocations

⚡ Memory & Speed Optimizations: Dramatically reduced allocations across the board by adopting CompactString in engine models, precalculating directory counts, and reducing deduplicator allocations.
⚡ Parallel MFT Parsing & Sharded Pool: Parallelized MFT record processing and introduced a sharded StringPool to maximize multi-core CPU utilization, yielding a ~49% speedup.
⚡ MFT Flat Representation: Implemented a flat memory representation for hierarchy resolution in the MFT driver, reducing traversal times by ~9.6%.
⚡ Sector-Aligned DMA Reads: Implemented unbuffered, sector-aligned DMA read operations in the MFT driver to bypass OS caching and accelerate disk reading by ~6.9%.
⚡ Manual AVX2 UTF-16 Decoder: Implemented a manual AVX2-optimized UTF-16 decoder for rapid MFT filename parsing, improving speed by ~4.6%.
⚡ MFT Allocation Reduction: Replaced standard vectors with stack-allocated SmallVec in parsed MFT models, reducing heap allocations and boosting speed by ~3.7%.
⚡ MFT String Interning & Cache Scaling: Switched to CRC32-based string interning and scaled up the L1 cache size in the MFT engine for faster path/name resolutions.
⚡ SIMD UTF-16 Decoder SSE Fallback: Added SSE fallback support to the SIMD-accelerated UTF-16 filename decoder in the MFT engine.
⚡ Bottom-Up Size Propagation: Optimized size calculations in the engine coordinator by adopting a bottom-up propagation strategy.
⚡ Zero-Allocation & Branchless Search: Implemented allocation-free, branchless case-insensitive search algorithms in the directory explorer for faster filtering.
⚡ Fast Traversal & SIMD: Integrated SIMD loop optimizations and switched to stack-allocated SmallVec for tracking ancestors in deep directories.
⚡ Alloc-Free Treemap Rendering: Optimized the interactive treemap with allocation-free file extension mapping.
⚡ Treemap Render Optimizations: Dramatically optimized interactive treemap rendering by switching to zero-allocation draw calls, discarding sub-pixel draws earlier, and adjusting the pixel precision limit to 0.2 for crisper rendering.
⚡ Extension List Caching: Implemented a cached rendering strategy for file extension statistics, reducing draw calls by up to 50%.
⚡ Performance Polish: Switched key hashing tables to ahash's RandomState and replaced the extension map string types with CompactString to further minimize heap allocations, and reduced load on the current snapshot mutex lock.
⚡ Internment Migration: Switched file name storage in the arena to use xgx_intern for faster lookup and reduced heap allocations.
⚡ Linux Explorer Performance: Cached file permissions details and read owner UIDs/GIDs natively through libc to boost explorer rendering speed on Linux.
⚡ Extension Color Caching: Cached file extension color calculations in the GUI theme to reduce CPU load during rendering.
⚡ Mimalloc Integration: Configured mimalloc v3 as the default global allocator to accelerate memory allocations across multi-core systems.
⚡ Deduplicator Optimizations: Deferred path string allocations in the deduplicator to minimize heap usage during search.
⚡ Zero-Copy Node Storage: Restored true zero-copy node storage in the file arena to reduce latency and memory overhead.
⚡ Lowercase Extension Helper: Switched to a shared, stack-allocated with_lowercase_ext helper for file extension mappings to avoid heap allocations.
⚡ Zstd Compression for Persisted Snapshots: Migrated the snapshot persistence format to a compressed Zstd payload, replacing unsafe copy-on-write memory mapping (memmap2) with safe heap allocations during decompression to improve file safety and reliability.
⚡ Safe UTF-16 Decoder Optimization: Replaced unsafe SIMD AVX2/SSE implementations with safe Rust iterators and boundary checks that optimize down to SIMD via LLVM.

UI, UX & Visual Polish

🎨 Rebranded Visuals: Replaced existing logos and icons across the GUI and documentation with modern, high-quality SVG/raster variants, and added a utility script for icon generation.
🎨 UI & Layout Refinements: Polished the user interface by organizing bottom panel controls, improving center panel padding, adjusting column spacing, and enhancing modal layouts with higher contrast.
🧹 Deduplicator Cleanup: Disabled the file extensions panel while viewing the Deduplicator tab to reduce visual clutter, and cleaned up tab headings.
♻️ Recycle Icon: Swapped the toolbar recycle icon with a larger, more visible version.
✏️ Explorer Column Renaming: Renamed the "Last Modified" column to "Modified" for a cleaner and more compact header layout.
🎨 UI Enhancements: Improved the table operations buttons styling (removing gray backgrounds for a cleaner look) and styled warning/detail modals with stronger, higher-contrast text.
🎨 Treemap Coloring: Switched to gamma multiplication for interactive treemap color scaling, yielding smoother visual gradients.
📄 Zero-Copy Documentation: Updated website templates, README, and GUI about modals to reflect the migration from zero-copy memory mapping to safe Zstd-compressed snapshots.
🌐 Web Disk Simulator Polish: Cleaned up disk names and models in the website simulator.

Platform Compatibility & Hardening

🛡️ Persistence Hardening: Improved overflow protection for memory-mapped persistence files.
🗂️ Platform-Native Path Slashes: Improved cross-platform path slash handling to ensure correct directory traversal and representation.
🛡️ Treemap Bounds Protection: Added robust bounds checks and protections when selecting the root node in the interactive treemap.
🛡️ NTFS MFT Driver Hardening: Significantly hardened the Windows-native NTFS MFT driver with extra safety checks and bounds validation.
🛡️ MFT Cross-Platform Separation: Separated Windows-specific MFT APIs from non-Windows target modules to keep the core engine portable and clean.
🪟 MFT Ingestion Refactoring: Consolidated the Master File Table (MFT) ingestion loop into a dedicated helper function for cleaner, more maintainable code.
🧹 Walk Context Refactoring: Refactored the recursive directory scanner context into a unified WalkCtx struct for cleaner and safer code.
🐧 Unix Root Scanning Improvements: Enhanced traversal of the system root on Unix/Linux by automatically filtering out virtual/system directories (such as /proc, /sys, /dev, etc.) and allowing local partition crossing.
🛡️ Safe User & Group Resolution: Replaced unsafe libc calls for retrieving Unix usernames and group names with safe APIs from the uzers crate.
🛡️ Windows Subsystem Execution: Adopted the cli-or-gui crate to dynamically check privileges and run commands, replacing custom platform-specific elevation blocks.
🛡️ Elevation Helpers Refactoring: Cleaned up custom Windows elevation and admin restart APIs by adopting a unified implementation from the cli-or-gui crate.
🛡️ Safe MFT Chunk Ingestion: Refactored the MFT ingestion Rayon thread boundaries to split mutable slices safely, completely avoiding unsafe raw pointer calls to from_raw_parts_mut.
🛡️ Safe Windows FS Type Check: Replaced unsafe Win32 calls to GetVolumeInformationW with safe cross-platform drive inspection APIs from the sysinfo crate.

Project Maintenance & Build Configuration

📦 Dependency Updates: Bumped project dependencies to their latest versions for improved security and stability.
💾 Persistence Format V2: Bumped the snapshot persistence header to v2 to support new metadata features.
📦 Dependency Upgrades: Upgraded underlying project dependencies, including updating egui-table-kit to version 0.2.1 and integrating egui-notify.
🪟 Console-Free Windows Executable: Configured the application so that the console command window does not spawn when launching the GUI on Windows.
📦 Release Build Optimizations: Enabled Link-Time Optimization (LTO thin), symbol stripping, and restricted codegen-units to 1 for release binaries to minimize executable size and improve performance.
📄 Documentation & Benchmarks: Updated the README to list speedup results for WinDirStat, include new context menu options, document positional arguments, refresh performance comparison benchmarks, clean up key feature wording, and link the license locally.
⚙️ Toolchain Update: Updated the local Rust compiler toolchain to nightly-2026-06-13.
⚙️ Safe Exit Flow: Avoided calls to std::process::exit() in the binary to ensure standard library destructors run cleanly on exit.
📄 README Visual Updates: Combined primary logo images, added a treemap screenshot under the logo, switched to a cleaner treemap-b variant logo, and replaced the drag race video with a first-frame thumbnailed version to speed up page load.
⚙️ Toolchain Update: Updated Rust nightly compiler toolchain to nightly-2026-06-15.
📦 Dependency Cleanup: Removed the direct dependency on libc as it is no longer required.
📦 Dependency Upgrades: Upgraded underlying project dependencies, including bumping bytes and wayland-protocols to their latest versions.
📦 Dependency Upgrades: Upgraded arrayvec to 0.7.7, sysinfo to 0.39.4, and log to 0.4.33.
📄 README Benchmarks Update: Updated README benchmarks with program versions, a WizTree drag race video comparison, and updated WinDirStat speed multipliers.
📄 Benchmark Disclaimers: Added program versions and benchmark methodology disclaimers to the README and website.
📦 Minimum Cargo Package Files: Add include to Cargo.toml to include only necessary files in the package.

Fixed

GUI & Interactive Elements

🖱️ Selection Behavior: Restored the ability to de-select nodes in both the directory explorer and the interactive treemap.
🔘 Dropdown Interactivity: Fixed the click hitbox for dropdown buttons in the directory explorer.
🖱️ Treemap & Scatter Plot Bugfixes: Truncated treemap depth past a set limit to prevent rendering overflows, resolved a block selection issue in the treemap, and improved hover text wrapping on plots.
♻️ Cache Clearing on Refresh: Fixed a bug where cached GUI elements were not cleared during a directory refresh or rescan.
🌐 Web Layout Clipping: Fixed layout clipping bugs on thin displays and small viewports by setting appropriate overflow-x properties and max-widths.
🌐 WizTree Speed Metrics: Corrected the WizTree benchmark time representation on the website simulator from 4.41s to 4.38s.

Cross-Platform & Windows MFT

🪟 Windows Ancestor Traversal: Resolved a bug in the directory traverser that caused incorrect ancestor resolution on Windows.
🪟 Windows Drive Resolution: Fixed a path-resolution issue for Windows root drives in the directory allocator arena.
📦 Cross-Platform Compilation: Fixed build configurations so that the windows crate dependency is only compiled on Windows targets and correctly supports MSVC builds.
🪟 Windows GUI Launching: Fixed the entry point executable logic to properly apply the Windows GUI subsystem directive.
🪟 UNC Volume Paths: Resolved an issue where UNC volume paths were not handled correctly in the Windows MFT driver.
🪟 UNC Visual Path Cleanups: Fixed missing UNC path cleanups across several modals, operations, and explorer views in the GUI.
🧪 Test Suite Fixes: Updated path reconstruction unit tests for Windows drive compatibility.
📦 Unix-only Dependencies: Restricted the uzers dependency compilation to Unix/Linux targets to avoid MSVC/Windows compile failures.

Directory Scanner & Deduplicator

🧹 Deduplication Group Validation: Fixed a bug in the deduplicator where error-prone groups were not disqualified properly.
🌀 Directory Cycling Prevention: Fixed a potential infinite loop or dir cycling bug during recursive walk_dir scanning.
⏱️ Epoch Formatting Overflow Protection: Added checks to prevent year overflow in Unix timestamp date/time conversion.

Documentation & Build Pipelines

🍏 macOS Packaging: Fixed incorrect icon paths in the macOS CI/CD release configuration.
🧪 CI/CD Toolchain Pinning: Updated CI/CD test and release workflows to compile with nightly-2026-06-13 to match the local toolchain.
📝 Clippy Warnings in Docs: Fixed documentation formatting and naming to eliminate Clippy lints.
🧪 Clippy Lints: Resolved new miscellaneous Clippy warnings introduced by the latest Rust nightly compiler.
🧪 Safe UID Checks in Tests: Replaced unsafe direct libc::getuid() calls in unit tests with a safe command execution of id -u.
🧪 Clippy Lints: Resolved clippy warnings around thread-local constant initializers on Windows targets.
🌐 Web Deployment fixes: Switched the automated deployment of the website to native GitHub Pages actions and ensured logo assets are properly retained in the build directories.
🧪 CI/CD License Tests: Removed non-deterministic cargo-about license checks from CI/CD pipeline tests.
🧪 CI/CD Safe Directory: Configured Git safe directory settings in CI/CD runner to resolve checkout permission errors.
📝 Typos Whitelist: Added the assets directory to the typos configuration whitelist.