Space offers three main ways of visualising how your space is being used: Block mode, List mode and Pie mode.

In addition, a tree view of the directory hierarchy can be toggled on and off, and appears to the left of the main visualisation view. Clicking any directory in the tree view 'focuses' the main view on the selected directory. The panel can be enabled or disabled using the Tree panel option in the View menu, or the button on the toolbar.

A display of free space can be enabled or disabled using the Show free space option in the View menu, or using the toolbar button.

In block mode, files and directories are represented by coloured blocks. The size of the block is proportional to the size of the file, or if the block represents a directory, the size of all files contained within that directory and any subdirectories.

This lets you see at a glance the relative sizes of all the files and directories at once, to as many levels as can be displayed without the blocks getting too small.

Blocks representing directories have a black border; double clicking on a directory block will set that directory as the 'root' of the view, so that only the contents of that directory are shown.

To return the view to the parent directory, double click the outermost block, or choose the 'Open parent' menu item (in the View menu), or press the button on the toolbar.

You can alter the size of the border in Block mode using the Block Mode tab of Preferences. Reducing the border size gives you a more detailed view of deeper levels of directories, at the cost of fewer filename labels being displayed.

These screenshots of the same directory with different border settings demonstrate the difference:

This is the most basic of the three modes. It shows a list of the files and directories within the current directory, their sizes, and dates of creation, last access and last modification.

By clicking on the appropriate headers in the list, the list can be sorted according to any of these criteria. Clicking again on the same header reverses the order of sorting. The default sorting method is by size, with the largest file or directory at the top.

List mode can be configured to show either all files in all subdirectories of the current directory, or only files and directories that are directly contained in the current directory. The mode can be switched with the 'Show all contained files' option in the View menu, or the button on the toolbar.

Pie mode shows a pie chart of the sizes of files and directories immediately contained in the current directory.

The segments of the pie are labelled to show which files or directories they represent, and the percentage of space they occupy in the current directory. In directories with many files, the labels of the smaller files will be omitted to make room for the large files' labels.