Excise¶
Excise is a terminal storage navigator for understanding and surgically removing exactly the files and folders you choose. It combines an interactive storage map with careful space accounting, bounded resource use, safe handling of unusual file names, and a deliberate review before permanent deletion.
Permanent means permanent
Excise deletes confirmed entries without a trash folder or undo. Start with a disposable directory, keep the default confirmation enabled, and read the Permanent Deletion Contract before acting on real data.
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Start safelyInstall Excise, create a disposable fixture, and learn the review flow before scanning anything important.
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Set your defaultsConfigure scan scope, resource budgets, themes, keymaps, and noninteractive report output.
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Understand the resultChoose human-readable table output or versioned JSON, then interpret exact, uncertain, and partial results correctly.
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Review the safety modelLearn the deletion, accounting, and threat-model contracts that bound what Excise claims and does.
A Map With Explicit Limits¶
| If you need to… | Start here |
|---|---|
| Inspect disk usage interactively | Getting Started |
| Set persistent scan or interface preferences | Configuration |
| Consume stable output in automation | Reports & JSON Formats |
| Understand concurrent scanning, deletion, and storage | Architecture |
| Audit deletion or accounting guarantees | Safety Contracts |
What Excise does not promise
Excise does not claim a physical-storage total for copy-on-write files, clones, compression, or filesystem deduplication. It keeps uncertainty explicit, never converts an unknown allocation into a guessed value, and never turns a partial scan into deletion authority. See Space Accounting and the Threat Model.
Learn the System¶
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Architecture
The main loop, session coordinator, persistent scanner, immutable ScanStore, and bounded ownership model.
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Background tasks
Why scan, refresh, planning, and deletion work have fixed queues and explicit ownership.
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Safety contracts
The identity checks, interruption behavior, unknown-space rules, and evidence needed for safe change.
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Project lineage
Excise’s relationship to Diskonaut and the preserved historical tags.
Contribute and Maintain¶
- Development covers the toolchain, local verification, generated artifacts, fuzzing, benchmarks, and the documentation site.
- Release Process defines the exact-commit candidate and promotion procedure.
- Project Lineage records attribution and the boundary between Excise and its predecessors.