Now we're getting somewhere. This works surprisingly well, too. Existing
ncdu behavior is to remember which entry was previously selected but not
which entry was displayed at the top, so the view would be slightly
different when switching directories. This new approach remembers both
the entry and the offset.
I initially wanted to keep a directory's block count and size as a
separate field so that exporting an in-memory tree to a JSON dump would
be easier to do, but that doesn't seem like a common operation to
optimize for. We'll probably need the algorithms to subtract sub-items
from directory counts anyway, so such an export can still be
implemented, albeit slower.
libc locale-dependent APIs are pure madness, but I can't avoid them as
long as I use ncurses. libtickit seems like a much saner alternative (at
first glance), but no popular application seems to use it. :(
Eaiser to implement now that we're linking against libc.
But exclude pattern matching is extremely slow, so that should really be
rewritten with a custom fnmatch implementation. It's exactly as slow as
in ncdu 1.x as well, I'm surprised nobody's complained about it yet.
And while I'm at it, supporting .gitignore-style patterns would be
pretty neat, too.
I tried playing with zbox (pure Zig termbox-like lib) for a bit, but I
don't think I want to have to deal with the terminal support issues that
will inevitably come with it. I already stumbled upon one myself: it
doesn't properly put the terminal in a sensible state after cleanup in
tmux. As much as I dislike ncurses, it /is/ ubiquitous and tends to kind
of work.
The new data model is supposed to solve a few problems with ncdu 1.x's
'struct dir':
- Reduce memory overhead,
- Fix extremely slow counting of hard links in some scenarios
(issue #121)
- Add support for counting 'shared' data with other directories
(issue #36)
Quick memory usage comparison of my root directory with ~3.5 million
files (normal / extended mode):
ncdu 1.15.1: 379M / 451M
new (unaligned): 145M / 178M
new (aligned): 155M / 200M
There's still a /lot/ of to-do's left before this is usable, however,
and there's a bunch of issues I haven't really decided on yet, such as
which TUI library to use.
Backporting this data model to the C version of ncdu is also possible,
but somewhat painful. Let's first see how far I get with Zig.
