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Reading the Map
The map is a treemap: a rectangle for the whole scan, divided into rectangles for what is inside, divided again. The area of every box is proportional to the space it uses, so a folder that takes half the drive takes half the picture.
- Folders are frames with a title bar: the name, the size and, if Settings › Treemap › Folders says so, the file count. Everything inside the frame is inside the folder.
- Files are boxes inside their folder's frame, with the name and size when there is room.
- Small things are grouped. Below a certain size the map draws one box labeled "312 files" instead of 312 slivers. Settings › Treemap › Layout › Density sets how early that happens; Everything turns grouping off.
- Free space can be drawn as a gray block at the top level of a whole-drive scan (Settings › Map › Show free space, off by default). It grows when you delete.
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Single-folder chains such as
Users › you › AppData › Localare drawn as one frame with a combined title unless Settings › Map › Merge single-folder chains is off.
Color by, in the toolbar, decides what the colors mean:
| Mode | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Top folder | One hue per top-level folder, lighter with each level inside. Good for "which part of the drive is this?" |
| Depth | A different color per nesting level, the way SpaceMonger did it. |
| File type | Files colored by what they are (video, images, archives, game data and so on); a legend appears. Folders stay neutral. |
The actual colors come from the palette (Palettes and looks). Press K to cycle the modes.
The filter dims everything that does not match and leaves the layout alone, so you see where the matches are (The filter).
By default files are flat. Settings › Treemap › Shading turns on cushion shading, light-to-dark across each box the way SpaceMonger drew them, with presets (Soft, Classic, Deep) and sliders for depth, spread, tone, fade inside folders and the light's direction. The sample map at the top of that page follows every change.
Hovering a box shows a card with its size, size on disk, file count, last-modified date and, when a scan is compared, how it changed. The status bar shows the hovered item's share of the scan. Click to select; Ctrl+click adds, Shift+click selects a range; right-click for the menu (Navigating).
During a folder walk the map draws itself. Finished folders appear as they finish, real files and all; folders still being read get a stand-in that fills as they go. Nothing jumps: boxes ease from where they were to where they belong, and because the last picture already is the finished tree, the end of the scan is a small settle rather than a reveal. Settings › Behavior › Draw the map as the scan goes turns it off, which keeps the previous map in view until the new one is ready.
A file-table scan has no tree until the whole table is read, so it arrives in one piece; a banner at the top of the map says so while it runs.
Settings › Map › Size measure picks between File size (the bytes in the file) and Size on disk (whole clusters, compressed size for compressed, sparse and cloud files, the way Explorer's "Size on disk" counts). Hard-linked data, such as Windows' WinSxS, is counted once when Settings › Scanning › Count hard links once is on, which is why totals can differ from Explorer (FAQ).