51–60 of 208 posts
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You can also just run apps from anywhere - network drives, removable disks, disk images etc., so the system can’t just delete settings for apps it’s currently unaware of.
Yeah I think the real problem is that deleting an app isn't uninstalling (which is sometimes a feature not a bug), but Apple provides no paradigm for actually uninstalling that deletes preferences too.
Oh that's right, we can't control that, just have to pay the tax.
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This is complete bullshit. Alfred 5.0 was released in July last year and the last update 5.0.6 was in December. Packal is online and a couple of packages were updated 1 week 6 days ago. And not only that, but to replicate most of Alfred's functionality in Raycast, you have to rely on plugins and hope they are both secure and maintained by somebody whereas Alfred's functionality is maintained by the Alfred team. Stop…
Different user, but I too “remember” first quicksilver and then Alfred shutter. Did I hallucinate that, or did it happen and later have a revival, or what?
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The free AppCleaner was mentioned by another reader earlier in the thread, and I've been happy with CleanMyMac X.
AppCleaner is no good after you deleted an app by other means and it left crap on the hd tho… as far as I recall CleanMyMac was a paid closed course app?
I recently had to uninstall some apps and it’s common for apps to litter files throughout /Library and ~/Library. The UX from early MacOS days is you can drag/drop the App to the Trash Can to uninstall it. Does MacOS actually clean up the misc. files applications leave at some point?
Nope, still leaves them behind. I’ve been using AppCleaner ( https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ ) for years now and it’s a real neat (and free) app that’ll do a pretty decent job of cleaning up crud.
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I never had macOS remove those files automatically when dragging the app to the trash. I still have files left from 4 MacBooks ago (for apps I haven’t installed in a long time) because I’m always migrating the home folder. I guess they’re just expected to be left behind in case you change your mind and want to reinstall the app later. That way you’ll still continue where you left with the same settings. They’re inert…
> I guess they’re just expected to be left behind in case you change your mind and want to reinstall the app later. That way you’ll still continue where you left with the same settings. And if apps are well behaved, only writing tiny config files in ~/Library/Preferences/ and the like, it’s not really a problem. The amount of space taken up in that situation was tiny even when OS X 10.0 was brand new and 10GB was a c…
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Nope, still leaves them behind. I’ve been using AppCleaner ( https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ ) for years now and it’s a real neat (and free) app that’ll do a pretty decent job of cleaning up crud.
This is just unbelievable. The billion $$ company cant just automate the uninstall procedure for their users? How hard would it be to auto delete the contents of ~/Library? Or have some periodic auto clean? one can always dream, no? I wonder how many users that have uninstalled VMware still have 30 gigs of unused VMs lying around on their disk.
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That's also Apple's fault isn't it? App data should fall into an predictable folder regardless of the location from where is ran, if for whatever reason the app needs to use a different folder it should be something developers have to go to multiple hurdles to implement (e.g. specify in a manifest what files and where will them be stored, and explicitly specify it they should be automatically deleted or not after mov…
To be fair, the situation isn't much better on Windows or Linux. While at least they have a concept of uninstalling an application, you're still reliant on the developer actually getting it right and not missing some tempfile or something.
Many mainframe/minicomputer file systems support file expiry dates, which is an interesting feature which Unix missed.
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That's also Apple's fault isn't it? App data should fall into an predictable folder regardless of the location from where is ran, if for whatever reason the app needs to use a different folder it should be something developers have to go to multiple hurdles to implement (e.g. specify in a manifest what files and where will them be stored, and explicitly specify it they should be automatically deleted or not after mov…
> App data should fall into an predictable folder regardless of the location from where is ran In fact, App Store apps are guaranteed to do that (by being in a closed sandbox); that's why Apple has an uninstallation procedure only for App Store apps. > specify in a manifest what files and where will them be stored, and explicitly specify it they should be automatically deleted or not after moving the app to the trash…
It reminds me very much of how they made fun of Windows Vista in the past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyGUrPxG1iM
I don't know what a better solution would be but I don't think this is it. And the documents and downloads folders are pretty arbitrary on Mac. Any user created folders don't get this protection.
I do love the way that sandboxed apps only store stuff in one folder in the ~/Library/Containers folder though. Even non-MAS apps that are sandboxed have to do that.
In fact the trick in this article doesn't even mention this, if you use it with a non-sandboxed app you're not guaranteed to uninstall everything for sure using this method.