Changing binary/metric format in interactive mode?

[Byron]

Discussed in #305

^{Originally posted by th0rgall January 5, 2026}
I'm trying to compare the contents of two similar directories by their size, one resides on a Ubuntu x86-64 server and is accessed via SSH, the other is connected as an external drive to my local arm64 macOS machine. Both use prebuilt 2.32.2 binaries for their respective systems.

On the server, dua i uses binary units (GiB), on the Macbook it uses metric units (GB). This makes it hard to visually compare the folder sizes.

Interactive mode does not support the --format option, so I'm wondering,

• is there any way to change the format? Am I missing some interactive command or configuration?
• based on what the format used in dua i determined? (why is it different on both systems?)

[Byron]

     Running `target/debug/dua i -h`
Launch the terminal user interface

Usage: dua interactive [OPTIONS] [INPUT]...

Arguments:
  [INPUT]...  One or more input files or directories. If unset, we will use all entries in the current working directory

Options:
  -e, --no-entry-check             Do not check entries for presence when listing a directory to avoid slugging performance on slow filesystems
  -t, --threads <THREADS>          The amount of threads to use. Defaults to 0, indicating the amount of logical processors. Set to 1 to use only a single thread [default: 3]
  -f, --format <FORMAT>            The format with which to print byte counts [default: metric] [possible values: metric, binary, bytes, gb, gib, mb, mib]
  -A, --apparent-size              Display apparent size instead of disk usage
  -l, --count-hard-links           Count hard-linked files each time they are seen
  -x, --stay-on-filesystem         If set, we will not cross filesystems or traverse mount points
  -i, --ignore-dirs <IGNORE_DIRS>  One or more absolute directories to ignore. Note that these are not ignored if they are passed as input path
      --log-file <LOG_FILE>        Write a log file with debug information, including panics
  -h, --help                       Print help (see more with '--help')