Recently I got an email asking for a trimmed down English-only version of WinDirStat. To be honest I was quite flabbergasted and upset. After all both developers involved in WinDirStat are native Germans, so why not make it a light version that is German-only? I think everyone knows and accepts that English is the lingua franca of the modern world, but by the number of speakers you shouldn’t underestimate Mandarine either. The author of said mail had an English name so we can safely assume he was a native speaker of English. But why the assumption that a light version (he was referring to PortableApps as well) has to be English?
In fact besides the <Unknown> issue the translations were the next biggest issue for me. Why? Because the current system doesn’t allow users to translate themselves and maintain those translations independently from a developer who will have to link the resource DLL for that language. This is something that needs fixing, not the availability of those languages in the installations.
So, sorry. For the moment I’m not up for such an English-only light version. But after all it’s OpenSource … patches are welcome. But then there are these more pressing issues which really ask for patches … 
// Oliver
A 267kB (UPX’d) binary isn’t “light”?
Sure it’s light. The point here was to make it “lighter” by moving out all the language support (except English).
Don’t take it personally.
Your response is certainly reasonable – prioritized alongside other features it is nowhere near as important as other things, but it can certainly be left on the TODO list in case someone feels it would be worthwhile for them.
Theoretically it would be only a bit more work to support building a single-language version, whether English, German, or any other supported language (choosing at compile time instead of run-time).
This (Australian) english speaker (who is NOT the complainant) belatedly notes that if one deletes the various .dll and .chm files from Portable WinDirStat, it still works and is english-only!
Yep, and you are right 😉
The texts could be more efficiently packed than anything else, so it would be worthwhile including all available languages. That was my point.
Seeing as how language packs use up 5 KB of disk space …
Every once in awhile I get a question like that for Paint.NET. At startup it checks to make sure all its installation files are present, and runs a repair process (msiexec.exe /repair) if that isn’t the case. That includes all the language packs, and once in awhile I get an e-mail, “Why does Paint.NET complain if I delete the language packs!?” … Well c’mon. Paint.NET isn’t psychic about what languages you’ll need, and plus they barely take up any disk space anyway. I implemented this detect-and-auto-repair because I kept getting crash logs indicating that the resources files were … missing … *spooky music*. Haven’t had a crash report ever since.
Love WinDirStat btw — I recommend it a lot, it’s very helpful when figuring out if someone can migrate to an SSD. Going from a 500 GB to a 80 or 160 GB takes a bit of planning, and WinDirStat reduces that to about 5 minutes. Now, where’s the “donate” button … ?
English-only version Hah
I think thats funny…They must of been joking …. You build one of the best programs known in the English speaking world. I don’t think the best programmers are Indian, I believe their German and I’m not German I m Scottish.
So could we get a way to share the data from WinDirStat to this program Vue http://vue.tufts.edu/ Visual Understanding Environment.
This would be very useful for research purposes.
I’m a big fan so thanks for a great program and please put a Donate button up.
David
David, I sent them an email (via the contact form) to establish contact. Will see what comes off it.
Dear Oliver,
is there any update on thing.
I have an unknown file on my drive C in Windows 7 of 54.4. gb.
Cheers..
First of all, thank you for making WinDirStart available for free, to everyone regardless of their language.
I’m not a native English speaker either; however as we all agree that English is more and more the standard language of the Internet, we should perhaps consider the argument of an English WinDirStat redistributable again.
If you check my webpage, you’ll see that I’ve given a great deal of thought to the topic of using English in software development. The bottom line in this case is – the vast majority of those who would use a tool like WinDirStat have sufficient command of English to understand the few strings that WinDirStat uses.
As for Germans’ comprehension of English, it’s generally excellent throughout the country, even including bricklayers or panhandlers, let alone sophisticated computer users. Germans are just shy of making any mistakes. (This Spiegel article explains the problem very well.) However, we’re not the grammar police here, so nobody will care about a mistake or two.
So let’s give a more realistic thought to getting on with the times. The language should unite us, and that language is clearly English.