A Squarified Treemap by Hand, Because Charting Packages Cannot Drill Down
Helm's storage tool shows your disk as a treemap: every folder a rectangle, every rectangle sized by how much space it takes. Click one and you are inside it, looking at its children, with a breadcrumb trail back out. It goes from a 494 GB volume down to a single file. I drew it by hand. Not because the packages are bad, but because the thing that makes a treemap useful for disk space is the part…
The author describes creating a treemap visualization of disk space manually, as charting packages do not support the necessary features for a disk browser. These features include hit-testing to determine which folder is being interacted with, navigation as a first-class state, adaptive label sizing, and layout over a subtree rather than a flat list of values.
The author explains why the squarified algorithm for treemap layout is preferred over simpler methods that slice the rectangle along a single axis, as it produces more readable and visually appealing rectangles. The algorithm works by sorting children in descending order and greedily adding them to the current row while maintaining the smallest possible worst aspect ratio in that row.
The author notes that the treemap layout is only one part of creating a disk browser, as other features like hit-testing, navigation, adaptive labels, and reconciling file sizes with the operating system are necessary to provide an accurate and usable interface.
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