All OS file browsers are intentionally made not to show folder sizes to then sell OS "cleaners" or make users buy new hardware instead of allowing them to easily clean their PC from garbage.

First person who comments, that “calculating folder sizes is slow” is a liar, because it is not. Also having an on/off toggle for that is easier than anything else.

Use ls command to see folder sizes. All folders are 4 KB in the output of ls though

In Windows on the same folder I checked via: the properties, then checked using dir /a/s, then used git to check via du.

The shortest by far was the properties method. dir /a/s too a long ass time. du took an even longer ass time. I checked a folder that was about 68GB in size with a huge assortment of files.

So how do you check it faster if even the command line methods (one of which is third party) take a long time?

Seeing the same kind of thing on Linux. But du is shorter than properties in a rando file manager on Ubuntu. Both are expensive.

that's a bit paranoid and a bit factually wrong.

also: if you claim that "calculating folder sizes is fast", then you might very well prove it by providing a fast sample implementation?

(and the fastest way to provide that information would be to... cache it. update the sums when changing files. but that's memory, not computation.)

calculating folder sizes is slow

And you think it s not, please, write a simple tool like MC or Total commander.

And add folder size.

I would pay you 35$ for MC with folder sizes.

Which OS vendor does sell OS "cleaners"? It’s all 3rd party malware, I think.

it is slow, if you have remote filesystems connected.

@Lensflare

When I was a kid: mall wear, stuff from clothing stores at the mall.

As an adult: malware, shit that fucks up your computer. Makes me want to get a real maul and fuck some people up.

@f4lt not all. Some are 8kb, or even larger. Depends on the number of files inside [not their sizes].

As for the OP, all folders have size that's a multiple of a filesystem's block size. Usually it's 4kb. Do you want a file manager to always remind you of that? Everyone knows that by heart, but you need it reminded?

If you want it to show a total size of files inside, then that's a whole different feature and contradicts the 'everything is a file' dogma - you prolly misunderstand how filesystems and directories work. Look it up.

A conspiracy involving Microsoft, Apple and literally everyone hacking on FOSS file browsers to sell OS cleaners?! Seriously?!

And yes, grabbing the file sizes of a folder and sub folders can be quite slow even on SSDs. If you want to know how slow it can be, you can see for yourself in most file browsers by viewing the folder properties which normally include the commulative size of its content. Try some top-level folders and you are gauaranteed to find some you wouldn't want to wait for when just browsing the file system. And then imagine the speed on SATA drives. And then imagine the speed on Pata drives.

Sure, they could display commulative content size asynchronously. But most users rarely need that and burrying that in the folder properties dialog is actually good enough.

@Lensflare

3rd party malware sponsored by OS makers

If anyone is interested, there are tools for showing folder sizes in

Windows - FolderSize free tool that works intuitively perfectly

Linux - Krusader free tool that has calculate size (ctrl+q) option for currently open directory

Mac - surprisingly has native support for that in finder View->Show view options->Calculate all sizes

Calculating all folder sizes for root of 256gb ssd takes around 1 minute, which is fast. Try to use them and you will be able to delete gigabytes of cache, logs and other garbage that any OS/app stores in mass on your drive.

I'd love to see how you'd implement this, and how you'd handle things like filesystem loops. Just getting the size of my projects folder takes ~3 minutes, and that's not even 1/20 of the size of the NVMe SSD it's on. The more files and folders in the folder being checked, the longer it takes.

@Parzi

mac does that natively with no problem, look my comment above

@Argos that's likely caching the values, which is one way to do it, but also requires space on its own. I think the Windows indexer does something similar, but won't used the cached data for displaying the sizes, iirc it's for drive health tracking or something dumb like that.