broot's whale-spotting mode and staging area streamline disk cleanup in one pass
When disks fill up, engineers typically rely on repetitive du and rm commands that only show flat directory totals, requiring deletions one folder at a time. The broot file manager offers an alternative workflow using its whale-spotting mode, launched with br -w, which sorts files and directories by size in an interactive tree. Users can press Ctrl-G on any file to add it to a staging panel, building a review set and seeing the total space to be freed before deleting anything. Once the desired files are collected, switching focus to the staging panel with Ctrl-Right and typing :rm removes the entire set in a single step. The workflow reduces disk cleanup to three stages — list, review, and delete — replacing the traditional back-and-forth loop with a single interactive session.
