Sequoiaview altrnatives
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/12
I wrote about Sequoiaview in depth in SequoiaView Homepage, made some research notes in “cushion treemap” delphi – Google Search and touched it slightly in A choco install list.
I never heard back from my request for Sequoiaview source code, and given ever increasing local storage media sizes, the speed of it now has become an issue, so I started looking to see if more alternatives have appeared and what sets them apart.
TL;DR
- There is the open source WinDirStat that runs as non-admin and is about as slow as Sequoiaview
- There is the closed source but free for personal use WizTree that requires admin elevation and is much faster than Sequoiaview and WinDirStat
Neither of them allow for a view that is cushion treemap only.
The reason that WizTree is fast is that it directly uses the NTFS MFT (Master File Table) to read the information from. This requires elevated permissions.
This is the same mechanism used by the Everything search tool, but unlike Everything, WizTree:
- does not update itself when files change
- has no option to split running into back-end service (that requires at service level, so by definition privileged) and front-end user interface (that can run unprivieged)
Links
Most via [Wayback/Archive] “sequoiaview” “everything” – Google Search or [Wayback/Archive] windirstat everything – Google Search.
- Treemapping – Wikipedia
- [Wayback/Archive] WinDirStat – Windows Directory Statistics of which Google search returned so many repositories that only the below blog post makes it clear which the primary is.
- [Wayback/Archive] WinDirStat – Background and history
- [Wayback/Archive] WinDirStat propaganda blog | per aspera ad astra
- [Wayback/Archive] WinDirStat Project Top Page – OSDN
- Older repositories:
- [Wayback/Archive] JDuverge/windirstat: WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for various versions of Microsoft Windows. Feel free to send pull requests or even ask for access to the team. ATTENTION: The main repo is going to be kept in Mercurial, so this is not the authoritative copy. This won’t matter unless you use very special Git features in your changesets. ended up higher in my search result than the official repository
- [Wayback/Archive] windirstat/windirstat: WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for various versions of Microsoft Windows.
- [Wayback/Archive] windirstat packages dissection – Repology
- [Wayback/Archive] Extras/windirstat.json at master · ScoopInstaller/Extras
- [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | WinDirStat (Install) 1.1.2.20161210
- [Wayback/Archive] Combining WinDirStat’s pillow diagrams with Everything – voidtools forum
- [Wayback/Archive] I love the new(?) Storage feature, you can drill down into the files. : Windows10
If you like that, you’ll love Wiztree. It’s like SequoiaView and WinDirStat except it reads the NTFS master file table (the same way Everything does) so it’s incredibly fast.
…
Holy crap that is fast! WinDirStat usually takes 15+ minutes, and this scanned in less than 30 seconds. Thanks so much!
- [Wayback/Archive] WizTree – The Fastest Disk Space Analyzer
- [Wayback/Archive] Download WizTree
- [Wayback/Archive] wiztree packages dissection – Repology
- [Wayback/Archive] Extras/wiztree.json at master · ScoopInstaller/Extras (the portable version)
- [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | WizTree 4.11 (the full installed version)
- [Wayback/Archive] KDirStat
- [Wayback/Archive] shundhammer/qdirstat: QDirStat – Qt-based directory statistics (KDirStat without any KDE – from the original KDirStat author)
- [Wayback/Archive] Disk Inventory X
Future
I wish there was a tool that would combine the simplicity of the Sequoiaview UI with the speed of WizTree and the auto-update of Everything.
A cool solution would be to write a different front-end for Everything that communicates with its service back-end.
For that, two directions come in mind:
- reverse engineering the Sequoiaview Delphi code to extract the cushion treemap out of it, then connect it to Everything
- writing a C# tool
So I did some asking and searching around, just in case I am ever going to take this up:
- [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on Twitter: “Any of my Tweeps that knows an open source cushion treemap implementation in either C# or Delphi? Over the last 2 decades, I tried to reach out to some of the people behind Sequoiaview team but to no avail. WinDirStat is based on Sequoiaview, but C++: 20+ years ago for me.”
- [Wayback/Archive] Wacko Jacko on Twitter: “@jpluimers Something like this…?”
- [Wayback/Archive] TreeMap/TreeMapViewCustomDraw.cs at master · JasmeetDani/TreeMap which is hardly documented and about 2% of the project (Boy I didn’t know that Unity had so much overhead!)
C#/.NET cushion treemaps
- [Wayback/Archive] “C#” cushion treemap – Google Search
- [Wayback/Archive] Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies (also below) of which the 2005 archived [Wayback/Archive] Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies made me find an archived edition of the
- [Wayback/Archive] Microsoft Researchs: Downloads – Treemap+.NET which later got renamed into
- [Wayback/Archive] Microsoft Researchs: Downloads – Treemap+.NET (Data Visualization Components) where clicking on the download gets you to a confirmation screen revealing a GUID
- [Wayback/Archive] Microsoft Research Download Center: FUID=
8f88d498-0bd1-4aa4-9ec7-7c7c0c0eb5d4which made me search fo - [Wayback/Archive] 8f88d498-0bd1-4aa4-9ec7-7c7c0c0eb5d4 – Google Search that regrettably only had one irrelevant result.
- [Wayback/Archive] “Microsoft Research” “Data Visualization Components” – Google Search had a tiny bit more success:
- [Wayback/Archive] Visualization Components 1.4 Free Download. Microsoft Research Demo Size 2.3 MB Download Free at PCWin got me to
- [Wayback/Archive] Download Visualization Components 1.4 – Select Download Mirrors – Full Download
The Community Technologies group at Microsoft Research has developed a set of components for displaying data in .NET applications. Included in this package are: a treemap. A treemap is a rendering of hierarchical data as a set of nested boxes, where each box corresponds to one data element; a bubble chart, which is a set of points displayed as bubbles in an x-y coordinate system; a piano roll is a spreadsheet-like display in which each cell is displayed in a variety of graphical formats; a spire chart (histogram) has a column for each week in a specified year; a thread tree is a hierarchy of nodes; and a time series chart displays multiple time series.
- which got me to
http://ftp.research.microsoft.com/downloads/dda33e92-f0e8-4961-baaa-98160a006c27/VisualizationComponents_1.4.msiwhich is not archived anywhere, but: - [Wayback/Archive] “dda33e92-f0e8-4961-baaa-98160a006c27” – Google Search
- [Wayback/Archive] Data Visualization Components – Microsoft Research
http://ftp.research.microsoft.com/downloads/dda33e92-f0e8-4961-baaa-98160a006c27/VisualizationComponents_1.4.msiis not archived anywhere - [Wayback/Archive] WordCloud – A Squarified Treemap of Word Frequency – CodeProject has downloads of which at one of the Microsoft Research assemblies (
TreemapGenerator.dll) is included.
- [Wayback/Archive] Data Visualization Components – Microsoft Research
- [Wayback/Archive] Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies (also below) of which the 2005 archived [Wayback/Archive] Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies made me find an archived edition of the
- [Wayback/Archive] c# – Visual Treemap in Winforms – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] leora, [Wayback/Archive] User JDunkerley and [Wayback/Archive] Drew Noakes)
A
Microsoft Research put one together.
…
research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/dda33e92-f0e8-4961-baaa-98160a006c27C
It’s easy to use. It’s written in .Net 1.1 (Arraylists and all) and the UI is pretty basic
A
I know you asked about WinForms, but I’m sure someone will hit this page when searching for WPF tree maps. This currently seems to be the best WPF freebie out there, though I found a few minor issues with it, it’s still pretty good:
treemaps.codeplex.com-
- [Wayback/Archive] Squarified Treemaps in XAML & C# using Microsoft Longhorn – CodeProject which is a great article explaining all the steps of the algorithm.
- Note that the downloads
http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/treemaps/treemaps_src.zipis not archived andhttps://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/treemaps/treemaps_src.zipcannot be archived as they are behind a logon-wall.
- Note that the downloads
- [Wayback/Archive] Squarified Treemaps in XAML & C# using Microsoft Longhorn – CodeProject which is a great article explaining all the steps of the algorithm.
-
- [Wayback/Archive] Search: Data Visualization Components – Microsoft Research has this on the first page:
Delphi treemaps
- [Wayback/Archive] “delphi” cushion treemap – Поиск в Google
- [Wayback/Archive] Visualisatie van Delphi code documented part of my queste to get the SequoiaView source code and this research page:
- [Wayback/Archive] Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies
Including the History of Treemap Research at the University of Maryland
Started Dec. 26th, 1998 by Ben Shneiderman
Later updates by Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant – Last update Sept 2014
- [Wayback/Archive]
honors.cs.umd.edu/reports/treemap2000/treemap:TreeMap (some info on Delphi: TreeMap 97 was the latest version written in Delphi)- [Wayback/Archive] TreeMap/TreeMap2000 (some more info on Delphi, but no source code; versions 2000 and up are in Java, but again: no source code)
- [Wayback/Archive]
honors.cs.umd.edu/reports/treemap2000/projects:Project Links (all are dead)
Note that none of these links got me to any source code implementing the algorithm.
- [Wayback/Archive] Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies
- [Wayback/Archive] 21924 TreeMaps for Delphi! is just a demo .exe that requires the (long deprecated) Borland Database Engine; there is no source code whatsoever.
- [Wayback/Archive] nielsAD/Dosis: Interactive disk usage visualization using a treemap in the file properties dialog which looks like Delphi, but the actual TreeMap is JavaScript running in an embedded web-browser:
- [Wayback/Archive] ss-delphi-components/treemaps.pas at master · thenickdude/ss-delphi-components might be the only Delphi component, but I am not sure about the origin
- [Wayback/Archive] Visualisatie van Delphi code documented part of my queste to get the SequoiaView source code and this research page:
- Papers and SequoiaView links:
- The 1999 research paper that is behind Sequoiaview has some bits of Delphi code indicating it is really easy to implement: [Wayback/Archive] www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/ctm.pdf
To be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (INFOVIS’99), San Francisco, October 25-26, 1999
Cushion Treemaps: Visualization of Hierarchical Information
Jarke J. van Wijk Huub van de Wetering
Eindhoven University of Technology
Dept. of Mathematics and Computing Science P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands { vanwijk, wstahw } @win.tue.nl - [Wayback/Archive] www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/stm.pdf
Squarified Treemaps
Mark Bruls, Kees Huizing, and Jarke J. van Wijk
Eindhoven University of Technology
Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science,
P.O. Box 513,
5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands
email { keesh, vanwijk } @win.tue.nl - [Wayback/Archive] pure.tue.nl/ws/files/2954875/200911585.pdf
Holten, D. H. R. (2009). Visualization of graphs and trees for software analysis. [Phd Thesis 1 (Research TU/e /
Graduation TU/e), Mathematics and Computer Science]. Technische Universiteit Eindhoven.
https://doi.org/10.6100/IR642975 - [Wayback/Archive] The SequoiaView Homepage
- [Wayback/Archive] SequoiaView Homepage: Tips which has some regedit tricks showing various SequoiaView command-line parameters:
-dparameter:REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\SequoiaView] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\SequoiaView\command] @="E:\\Util\\disk\\SequoiaView\\Sequoia.exe -d \"%L\""…
-and plain directory parameters:REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.tre] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.tre\shell] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.tre\shell\open] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.tre\shell\open\command] @="\"C:\\Program Files\\SequoiaPRERELEASE\\Sequoia_Prv_5.exe\" \"-\" \"%1\"" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\visualize with SequoiaView] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\visualize with SequoiaView\command] @="\"C:\\Program Files\\SequoiaPRERELEASE\\Sequoia_Prv_5.exe\" \"%1\"" - [Wayback/Archive] https://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/Main_Frame/releaseNotesGerman.txt (which on the Wayback archive show Mojibake as the http://www.win.tue.nl serves the text-file as ANSI-encoded without specifying an encoding and the Wayback Machine defaults to UTF-8)
- [Wayback/Archive] SequoiaView: Useful links (some to the above papers, some dead due to Link rot)
- [Wayback/Archive] Treemap: Home page (Java implementation available for licensing)
- The 1999 research paper that is behind Sequoiaview has some bits of Delphi code indicating it is really easy to implement: [Wayback/Archive] www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/ctm.pdf
Treemaps in other languages
- [Archive] Internet Archive Search: treemaps
- [Archive] github.com-benmarwick-ctv-archaeology_-_2021-02-01_07-08-47 : benmarwick : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
- [Wayback/Archive] thomasp85/ggraph: Grammar of Graph Graphics (R/C++) has a TreeMap implementation
- [Wayback/Archive] Draw the rectangles in a treemap — geom_node_tile • ggraph
- [Wayback/Archive] Layouts • ggraph
- [Archive] github.com-benmarwick-ctv-archaeology_-_2021-02-01_07-08-47 : benmarwick : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Interfacing to Everything
I was hoping it was easy to interface to [Wayback/Archive] voidtools Everything
So I was really glad that a [Wayback/Archive] Matthijs ter Woord (@mterwoord) notified me that the support page [Wayback/Archive] Everything – voidtools. now has an entry [Wayback/Archive] SDK – voidtools with both a lot of API entry points, a few examples and the [Wayback] www.voidtools.com/Everything-SDK.zip.
That file contains the full SDK including examples, of which one is a .URL file linking to [Wayback/Archive] dipique/everythingio which has all files you need for a C# project, including:
- [Wayback/Archive] everythingio/Everything.cs at master · dipique/everythingio having the API wrapper which together with the the
Everything.hfile inside the above .zip file to create a Delphi API interface unit - [Wayback/Archive] everythingio/Program.cs at master · dipique/everythingio small console demo
The SDK pages also have entries for:
- [Wayback/Archive] C – voidtools which does an
#includeof theEverything.hfile inside the above .zip file to interface to the API - [Wayback/Archive] C# – voidtools
- [Wayback/Archive] Clarion – voidtools (with its own download at [Wayback] www.voidtools.com/Clarion_Everything.zip)
- [Wayback/Archive] IPC – voidtools
- [Wayback/Archive] IPC C Example – voidtools
A C example to send a search query to Everything using [Wayback/Archive]
WM_COPYDATAand retrieve the results.Note: requires Everything running in the background.
Note this requires the
everything_ipc.hfile from the above .zip file which has this comment// EVERYTHING_WM_IPC (send to the Everything taskbar notification window) // the Everything taskbar notification window is always created when Everything is running. (even when the taskbar notification icon is hidden) // HWND everything_taskbar_notification_hwnd = FindWindow(EVERYTHING_IPC_WNDCLASS,0); // SendMessage(everything_taskbar_notification_hwnd,EVERYTHING_WM_IPC,EVERYTHING_IPC_*,lParam) - [Wayback/Archive] Python – voidtools
- [Wayback/Archive] Visual Basic – voidtools
All but the above C example contain the API import definition in the example itself. Some require Everything running in the background.
Note that the above examples either require Everything32.dll or Everything64.dll to run (and sometimes even Everything32.lib or Everything64.lib to build) .
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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