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In 2003, Bernhard Seifert came across the KDE program KDirStat (kdirstat.sourceforge.net) and was fascinated and enthusiastic about it. 

SequoiaView (https://sequoiaview.win.tue.nl/) was around, but KDirStat's concept of coupling a tree list view with a treemap was unrivaled, and Bernhard didn't find anything equivalent for Microsoft Windows. So Bernhard wrote WinDirStat, using Mark Bruls, Kees Huizing, Jarke J. vanWijk, and Huub van de Wetering's papers on squarified treemaps (www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/stm.pdf) and cushion treemaps (www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/ctm.pdf).

Bernhard didn't worry too much about the functionality but simply cloned KDirStat. The pacman was not his idea, the extension list is. He tried to size and position each GUI element optimally and to avoid modal dialogue boxes. The program's goal was to output much information while requiring little user input. When Bernhard thought it was complete, he gave it to his sister and watched her interaction with the software. That gave him another two weeks of work to do. This procedure, together with a robust test plan, secured WinDirStat's quality.

Oliver Schneider and Bryan Berns have since taken responsibility for the project and enhanced the performance and functionality.  Many translations have also been contributed.

WinDirStat Team