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Nope, still leaves them behind. I’ve been using AppCleaner (https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/) for years now and it’s a r

Nope, still leaves them behind. I’ve been using AppCleaner (https://freemacsoft.net/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.

wkat4242 4y ago
Well, if it's a really modern application it will leave everything in only one folder in ~/Library/Containers as part of the sandbox. Besides the obvious security advantages of the sandbox this makes cleanup a lot easier too.
tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
AppZapper isn't free, but it's much more thorough.
- krackers 4y ago
  Based on https://reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qwp9db/i_have_compared_between_appcleaner_vs_appzapper/ https://reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qwp9db/i_have_compared_b... seems like AppCleaner is the more thorough one?
  - jb1991 4y ago
    Most thorough would be to investigate every single file on your system for an app using this: https://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/ https://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/ Then just trash them.
- timothevs 4y ago
  Really? I thought it was abandonware… I used it all the time back in the day, but I thought it went the way of the Disco app.
  - krackers 4y ago
    I miss disco so much. Back from the Delicious Era [1] of apps that were functional yet had character and play. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/05/the-delicious-generation-strikes-back/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/05/the-delicious-genera... I wholly disagree with rogueamoeba's assessment that these were "style over substance". They were dead-simple to use, and you could always disable the smoke if you hated fun. They may not have all the bells and whistles of the bloated 40MB disc burning suite, but if all you wanted to do was burn a linux iso or transfer some songs to stick in your car stereo, this was the go-to tool for the job. https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2006/11/06/ https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2006/11/06/ Also I find it ironic that rogueamoeba lambasts the "delicious generation" when I think their Piezo app would fit right into it.
    - shp0ngle 4y ago
      The delicious era … it was nice to “be there”, but honestly, I always felt like it was too much glossy. And I usually missed some feature there and felt back to the “boring” apps. And I mean, Delicious Library… it looks good, but… why would I scan everything I have, to look at it on my Mac? What’s the point. I never understood it even back then. But yeah, GUIs from that era were amazing, and then moved to iOS in the first iterations, with all the skeuomorphism. It all died with the move to the new flat designs I guess. Today Mac apps are just mostly Electron/swiftui and boring.
  - stuartd 4y ago
    Got AppZapper from a bundle maybe a decade ago. Still works.
tacker2000 4y ago
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.
- jrmg 4y ago
  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.
  - skyyler 4y ago
    Revo Uninstaller for windows manages to do this.
  - mattigames 4y ago
    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 moving the app to the trash)
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      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.
      - skissane 4y ago
        The filesystem doesn’t have rich enough metadata about temporary files. At least Windows has a file attribute for temporary files (FILE_ATTRIBUTE_TEMPORARY), although I’m uncertain how many apps actually set it on their temporary files; Linux/Unix/etc appears to have no real equivalent. I think ideally temporary files would have rich metadata - the ID of the process, session, and application/package which created them, and some kind of retention policy and expiry date. Of course, one could always use xattrs for that, but unless they are standardised few would use them. C library functions such as mkstemp/mkdtemp/etc could be enhanced to set metadata on temporary files. The OS package manager (apt/rpm/etc) could put an xattr on an executable with the UUID of the package, and then mkstemp could copy that to an xattr of all temporary files. Now if the FS also indexed xattrs, we could upon uninstall find all temp files owned by a given package and remove them. Many mainframe/minicomputer file systems support file expiry dates, which is an interesting feature which Unix missed.
dhc02 4y ago
Worth noting that Raycast does a serviceable job of this all by itself, and you probably already have that if you're reading this here.
- drewbitt 4y ago
  Why would I probably have that? Alfred has historically been the far more popular choice. Did I miss a mass exodus?
  - tough 4y ago
    Alfred has been dead for some time, a couple years back I noticed their packal community packages page being broken. Raycast is the present and future that quicksilver et alfred started.
    - rcarr 4y ago
      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 spreading misinformation.
      - IggleSniggle 4y ago
        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?
        tough 4y ago
        Yeah I didnt knew much about alfred 5 tbh
  - dhc02 4y ago
someNameIG 4y ago
What I normally do is use finder to search for system files and delete them also along with the .app . You have to add system files to the search manually though. When you search there is a + next to save in finder, click that, have name and matcha, + another option, choose other and scroll down to System Files, then set to are included.
soraminazuki 4y ago
Homebrew Cask can remove application-generated files if you pass the --zap option to "brew rm". Cask definitions include a list of known paths to those.
- eviks 4y ago
  Yeah, unless the definition doesn't include something
  - soraminazuki 4y ago
    It does, a lot of the time though. Casks are actively maintained and adding a missed file to the list is only a single pull request away.
jb1991 4y ago
There's also this, which lets you track down all files related to an app anywhere on the system and then manually trash them: https://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/ https://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/ I used it recently get rid of a bunch of Wacom garbage that was littered throughout my system and causing the mac to crash.
ravagat 4y ago
+1 for AppCleaner, came here to suggest it but here it is

wkat4242 4y ago

Well, if it's a really modern application it will leave everything in only one folder in ~/Library/Containers as part of the sandbox. Besides the obvious security advantages of the sandbox this makes cleanup a lot easier too.

tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago

AppZapper isn't free, but it's much more thorough.

krackers 4y ago
Based on https://reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qwp9db/i_have_compared_between_appcleaner_vs_appzapper/ https://reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/qwp9db/i_have_compared_b... seems like AppCleaner is the more thorough one?
- jb1991 4y ago
  Most thorough would be to investigate every single file on your system for an app using this: https://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/ https://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/ Then just trash them.
timothevs 4y ago
Really? I thought it was abandonware… I used it all the time back in the day, but I thought it went the way of the Disco app.
- krackers 4y ago
  I miss disco so much. Back from the Delicious Era [1] of apps that were functional yet had character and play. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/05/the-delicious-generation-strikes-back/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/05/the-delicious-genera... I wholly disagree with rogueamoeba's assessment that these were "style over substance". They were dead-simple to use, and you could always disable the smoke if you hated fun. They may not have all the bells and whistles of the bloated 40MB disc burning suite, but if all you wanted to do was burn a linux iso or transfer some songs to stick in your car stereo, this was the go-to tool for the job. https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2006/11/06/ https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2006/11/06/ Also I find it ironic that rogueamoeba lambasts the "delicious generation" when I think their Piezo app would fit right into it.
  - shp0ngle 4y ago
    The delicious era … it was nice to “be there”, but honestly, I always felt like it was too much glossy. And I usually missed some feature there and felt back to the “boring” apps. And I mean, Delicious Library… it looks good, but… why would I scan everything I have, to look at it on my Mac? What’s the point. I never understood it even back then. But yeah, GUIs from that era were amazing, and then moved to iOS in the first iterations, with all the skeuomorphism. It all died with the move to the new flat designs I guess. Today Mac apps are just mostly Electron/swiftui and boring.
- stuartd 4y ago
  Got AppZapper from a bundle maybe a decade ago. Still works.

tacker2000 4y ago

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.

jrmg 4y ago
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.
- skyyler 4y ago
  Revo Uninstaller for windows manages to do this.
- mattigames 4y ago
  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 moving the app to the trash)
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    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.
    - skissane 4y ago
      The filesystem doesn’t have rich enough metadata about temporary files. At least Windows has a file attribute for temporary files (FILE_ATTRIBUTE_TEMPORARY), although I’m uncertain how many apps actually set it on their temporary files; Linux/Unix/etc appears to have no real equivalent. I think ideally temporary files would have rich metadata - the ID of the process, session, and application/package which created them, and some kind of retention policy and expiry date. Of course, one could always use xattrs for that, but unless they are standardised few would use them. C library functions such as mkstemp/mkdtemp/etc could be enhanced to set metadata on temporary files. The OS package manager (apt/rpm/etc) could put an xattr on an executable with the UUID of the package, and then mkstemp could copy that to an xattr of all temporary files. Now if the FS also indexed xattrs, we could upon uninstall find all temp files owned by a given package and remove them. Many mainframe/minicomputer file systems support file expiry dates, which is an interesting feature which Unix missed.

dhc02 4y ago

Worth noting that Raycast does a serviceable job of this all by itself, and you probably already have that if you're reading this here.

drewbitt 4y ago
Why would I probably have that? Alfred has historically been the far more popular choice. Did I miss a mass exodus?
- tough 4y ago
  Alfred has been dead for some time, a couple years back I noticed their packal community packages page being broken. Raycast is the present and future that quicksilver et alfred started.
  - rcarr 4y ago
    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 spreading misinformation.
    - IggleSniggle 4y ago
      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?
      - tough 4y ago
        Yeah I didnt knew much about alfred 5 tbh
- dhc02 4y ago

someNameIG 4y ago

What I normally do is use finder to search for system files and delete them also along with the .app . You have to add system files to the search manually though. When you search there is a + next to save in finder, click that, have name and matcha, + another option, choose other and scroll down to System Files, then set to are included.

soraminazuki 4y ago

Homebrew Cask can remove application-generated files if you pass the --zap option to "brew rm". Cask definitions include a list of known paths to those.

eviks 4y ago
Yeah, unless the definition doesn't include something
- soraminazuki 4y ago
  It does, a lot of the time though. Casks are actively maintained and adding a missed file to the list is only a single pull request away.

jb1991 4y ago

There's also this, which lets you track down all files related to an app anywhere on the system and then manually trash them: https://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/ https://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/ I used it recently get rid of a bunch of Wacom garbage that was littered throughout my system and causing the mac to crash.

ravagat 4y ago

+1 for AppCleaner, came here to suggest it but here it is