I kept forgetting to delete my venvs, so I built a GUI for it

Ethan — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 02:45:44 +0000

Finished projects have this thing where they just... sit there. The code's done, the repo's pushed, and you've moved on. But somewhere on your disk, there's still a .venv quietly taking up space. Maybe you remembered to delete it. Probably you didn't.

I started noticing this when I was running low on disk space and had no idea where it all went. Turned out I had a bunch of old Python projects I'd wrapped up months ago, and most of them still had their virtual environments intact. A few node_modules too, from side projects that never made it past "proof of concept."

The annoying part wasn't that it happened — it's that cleaning it up meant going folder by folder, checking what's still active, and manually deleting things. There are CLI tools for this (npkill is great for node_modules) but nothing that handles both ecosystems in one place.

So I built DevTidy.

It scans your machine, shows you every Python virtual environment and node_modules it finds, sorted by size. You can see at a glance which ones belong to active projects and which ones are orphaned — the parent project folder is gone but the env is still sitting there.

A few things I cared about when building it:

It moves things to trash, not permanent delete. I didn't want to accidentally nuke something I still needed.
It covers all the Python env types — venv, virtualenv, conda, uv, Poetry, Pipenv, pyenv. They all look slightly different on disk and it was annoying to handle them all.
It shows you the size before you delete. Sounds obvious but it's motivating to see "this project I finished in 2023 is using 2.4GB."

Built with Tauri (Rust backend, React frontend), so it's a native desktop app. Available for macOS right now, Windows and Linux builds are coming.

It's open source: github.com/ethan-tsai-tsai/devtidy

If you've ever looked at your disk usage and thought "where did all of this come from" — give it a try.

DEV Community: Ethan

I kept forgetting to delete my venvs, so I built a GUI for it