Saturday, January 21, 2012

Manually Deleting Mac Applications

 

My quick list of things to look for when deleting Mac applications manually. Most mac applications seem well behaved and only populate things in /Applications and maybe a couple things in ~/Library. Other applications seems to try to put things in all sort of directories and even their own uninstaller doesn't clean up after them. Today's problem child is Mark/Space's Missing Sync. I ran the uninstaller, but it left behind a lot of stuff. So this is just my list of places to go look to uninstall the remaining pieces of applications.

  • First look to see if they have an uninstaller in /Applications
  • Re-download the package and see if the package comes with an uninstaller.
  • Applications, look for Applications and Folders named for what you want to uninstall.
  • Run AppZapper if there is no uninstaller
  • /Library/Application Support
  • /Library/Frameworks
  • /Library/Preferences
  • /Library/LaunchAgents
  • /Library/LaunchDaemons
  • /System/Library/Extensions
  • ~/Library/Application Support
  • ~/Library/Preferences