Heft

Tutorial: your first cleanup

This walks you through a first session with Heft: scanning a drive, reading the map, acting on suggestions, deleting safely and clearing caches. It takes about ten minutes.

The steps show Windows. macOS and Linux work the same way unless a step says otherwise. The disk screenshots use Heft's demo disk, so the files in them are made up.

1Download and open Heft

Go to the latest release and download the file for your system. Heft is a single program with no installer.

A warning the first time is expected. The downloads aren't code-signed yet. On Windows, "Windows protected your PC" appears: click More info, then Run anyway. On macOS, open System Settings > Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway. See the FAQ if Windows doesn't offer that choice.

2Scan a drive

The start screen asks what's filling your disks and lists your drives with their free space. Click one to scan it, or choose Scan a folder to look at just one folder. You can also drop a folder onto the window.

On Windows, Heft offers to Restart as administrator. Take it if you can: as administrator on an NTFS drive, Heft reads the drive's master file table directly, which takes seconds instead of minutes. Without it, Heft scans folders in parallel. That works everywhere, just more slowly.

While it scans you see how many folders it has read, the size so far and the time taken.

3Read the map

The Folders tab next to the treemap, with the Edits folder selected in both
The folder tree on the left and the treemap on the right show the same thing two ways. Selecting in one selects in the other.

The treemap on the right shows every file as a rectangle. The bigger the rectangle, the more space the file takes. Files in the same folder sit together, shaded like a cushion, so large folders stand out as blocks. The biggest rectangles are labeled.

The Folders tab on the left lists the same folders with their size, share of the parent folder, number of files and the date anything inside last changed. Folders are sorted biggest first, so the answer to "where did my space go" is usually in the first few rows.

Try Color by > Age in the toolbar. Recent files turn warm, old ones turn cool, and forgotten corners of the drive become easy to see.

4Start with Suggestions

The Suggestions tab listing big old files, old installers in Downloads and the hibernation file
Each suggestion shows how much space it would free and why it's there.

Open the Suggestions tab. Heft goes through the scan and lists things that are usually safe to remove: old installers in Downloads, build folders in projects you haven't touched in six months, Steam games you haven't played in a year, huge logs and crash dumps, and big files nobody has opened in years.

Some suggestions aren't things Heft deletes. The hibernation file and a leftover Windows.old folder, for example, come with the steps to remove them with Windows' own tools, because that's the safe way to do it. On a Mac, iPhone backups and Time Machine's local snapshots work the same way.

5Look for big files yourself

The Search tab listing the largest files, next to a treemap colored by file age
With no search text, the Search tab lists the largest files in the scan.

The Search tab starts out as a list of the largest files. Narrow it down:

The File types tab adds up space by kind of file (video, games, programs, archives) and by extension. Click a row to light those files up in the treemap.

6Delete safely

A dialog asking to move System32 to the Recycle Bin, warning that it is part of Windows
Deleting part of Windows needs an extra tick, and the dialog says what to use instead.

To remove something, right-click it and choose Move to Recycle Bin, or select it and press Delete (Cmd+Backspace on a Mac). Heft always asks first and shows how many files and how much space are involved.

Look out for the warning triangles in the tree. Heft marks system folders, installed programs, app data, cloud-synced folders, keys, mailboxes and saved games, and explains what could go wrong if you delete them. A red warning means the computer might not start afterwards; you have to tick a box to go ahead.

Files go to the Recycle Bin or Trash, not straight into oblivion. The space comes back when you empty it.

7Put something back

Deleted the wrong thing? The Removed tab lists everything Heft has moved to the Recycle Bin or Trash. Select items and press Put back, then rescan to see them in the map again. On a Mac, items removed with an earlier version of Heft have to be put back from Finder: open the Trash, right-click an item and choose Put Back.

8Clear caches with the Cleaner

The Cleaner page with rules grouped by Windows, Browsers and Applications, and results sorted by size
The Cleaner analyzes as soon as you open it. Nothing is removed until you press Clean.

Switch to the Cleaner page at the top. It checks a fixed list of known cache and temporary-file locations for your system, browsers and apps, and shows how much each would free.

Press Clean when you're ready. These files are deleted rather than recycled, because programs rebuild them anyway, and the confirmation says so.

9Keep it tidy

You're done with the big cleanup. A few things help keep it that way:

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