⌫ Safe cleanup

Everything in DiskInsight is designed around one principle: nothing is deleted behind your back. Cleanup means “move to the macOS Trash” — reversible, transparent, always confirmable.

Stage and review

Staging means marking something for removal without immediately doing anything about it. You can stage items from:

• The treemap — right-click and choose “Stage for cleanup”.
• The list view — select rows, right-click, stage.
• The duplicates view — stage all non-kept clones in a group with one click.

Staged items appear in the Cleanup sidebar section as a review list with sizes, file counts and per-item remove buttons. You can unstage anything at any time.

When you’re ready, click “Move to Trash”. A confirmation dialog appears. On confirm, all staged items move to the macOS Trash. The staging list is cleared and the scan is refreshed.

Quick Wins

The Quick Wins section scans your home for common reclaimable spaces:

• Caches (~/Library/Caches, .npm, .yarn, .cache)
• Downloads staging folders (macOS updaters, installer downloads, iCloud temp)
• Package manager leftovers (pnpm, Go, Cargo, Ruby gems)
• Build artifacts found in a home-wide search for node_modules, .build, DerivedData and other well-known directories

Each recommendation shows the exact bytes you’d free. Queue any of them, review the list, and trash them all in one go — again, always with a confirmation dialog.

App Uninstaller

Apps leave more behind than a simple drag-to-Trash can catch. The Uninstaller scans /Applications and for each app shows:

• Application Support
• Containers
• Caches
• Preferences
• Logs
• Saved State
• WebKit data

Select an app, queue it, and confirm. DiskInsight moves the app bundle and every leftover component to the Trash together.

Dev Cache Cleaner

Located below Cleanup in the sidebar, the Dev Cache Cleaner targets developer- and build-tool-specific leftovers:

• Xcode & simulators — DerivedData, Archives, iOS DeviceSupport, CoreSimulator Devices, CoreSimulator Caches
• Package managers — SwiftPM, CocoaPods, Carthage, Gradle, Maven
• Language caches — npm, Yarn, pnpm, NuGet, pip, Go builds, Go modules, Cargo registry, Cargo git cache, RubyGems

That’s 20 curated locations in total, organized by category.

A “Scan home” button runs a deep scan of your home directory looking for additional build directories (node_modules, .build, DerivedData, Pods, __pycache__, .venv, vendor/bundle, .swiftpm). The deep scan skips .git, .Trash and Library (handled by the curated list).

Select items, confirm, and trash. Everything goes to the Trash.

What is never touched

• Time Machine snapshots and APFS local snapshots — excluded by design.
• Anything in .Trash — never scanned.
• Symlinks — listed but never descended into.
• System files outside the user’s explicit scan scope.