Show HN: Fclones-GUI – a fast duplicate file finder with GTK4 interface

4 points

3 years ago

Some time ago, as an exercise in writing parallel Rust, I created fclones [1] - a command line utility to find and remove duplicate files. It was fun to develop, and soon it became quite advanced. It's probably also one of the most efficient duplicate finders available - some users reported using it for cleaning terabytes of data.

But, being a CLI app, it probably doesn't offer the best possible user experience for those who want an easy to use program.

In particular, the typical workflow of finding duplicates and then picking some of them to remove is hard to execute smoothly in a batch-oriented program.

Hence, I thought a GUI would be a nice improvement. And here it is! An old-school desktop app. In GTK+. Some say I'm crazy to do this in 2023.

It doesn't offer all the functionality available in its CLI cousin yet, but it already does the job: it finds duplicates and can remove the selected ones. It also shares the majority of code with CLI fclones, so it is also quite fast.

This is obviously a very early version. Let me know if you like it and which features you'd like to see next.

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