Mole 1.14.0 — Mac version

Mole runs on any Mac with macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer, on both Intel and Apple Silicon machines. It asks for Full Disk Access to do its job properly—without that, it can't see everything it needs to clean.

What you'll need

• Mole installed and Full Disk Access granted in System Settings
• A few minutes of patience while it scans

Clearing out app leftovers

Uninstalling an app by dragging it to the Bin often leaves preference files, caches and support folders behind. Mole digs these out. Open the app, go to the leftover scanner and let it run. It shows you a list of what it found, with file sizes, before it touches anything. You tick the bits you want gone and confirm—nothing happens without your say-so. All the scanning and cleaning happens on your machine. Nothing gets uploaded anywhere.

Skip your intentional cache folders

Mole works straight away, but a couple of tweaks make it fit how you actually use your Mac. Open Preferences from the menu bar and look through these:

• Skip folders you use on purpose. Some apps keep large caches you want—DAWs with sample libraries, design tools with preview renders. Add those paths to the ignore list and Mole won't flag them again.
• Turn on deep scan. Off by default, it needs Full Disk Access but finds leftovers the quick scan misses. Worth switching on before a big spring clean.
• Adjust the Dock startup list from inside Mole. It spots launch agents and login items you might not remember adding. Yank out the ones that just slow down boot time.

Found 80 GB of forgotten Lightroom cruft

A mate who shoots weddings brought over a MacBook Air wheezing on 12 GB free. Lightroom catalogs and raw files lived on an external drive, so the storage squeeze made no sense. We fired up Mole's disk analyser and the treemap lit up immediately—Adobe apps had left behind 38 GB of media cache files buried in /Users/~/Library. Lightroom's own preferences don't always show those. Mole listed them, showed the sizes, and waited for a tick. Ten minutes later the machine had 50 GB free and fans that actually spun down. The tree map view made it obvious in seconds what Finder's little bar chart never could.

Right-click to check a file before deleting it

• Right-click any scan result to reveal it in Finder. Handy when you want to check what a file actually is before deleting it.
• System status lives in the menu bar. CPU temperature, memory pressure and network throughput update in real time. Click the menu bar icon to see it without opening the main window.
• One-click maintenance runs several tasks together. It flushes DNS, rebuilds Spotlight indexes and clears system logs—things you'd normally do in Terminal one command at a time. Mole bundles them behind a single button.
• The built-in app updater keeps an eye on things you grabbed outside the App Store. If you pulled down a copy of mole 1.11.0 for mac from a GitHub release ages ago, it'll spot a newer build. It even reuses a finished download if an update didn't complete properly first time—no second fetch needed.
• Quit-and-reopen during updates is automatic. Mole asks permission before closing a running app, installs the update, then relaunches it. You don't have to remember to open it again.

• Apps you grabbed from a website can now update right inside Mole
• The app spots a newer build of the same version and offers it
• Before updating, Mole asks before quitting a running app and reopens it afterwards

• macOS 14 or newer
• Intel or Apple Silicon Mac
• Full Disk Access permission recommended