lumen-xx / spare

# Spare
An honest Mac cleaner for Apple silicon, macOS 14 or newer. It shows what takes up space, says plainly what each thing is and what happens once it's gone, and moves only what you choose to the Trash.
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## Install
macOS 14 or newer · Apple silicon
There's no version for Intel Macs. Apple no longer makes them, and without one to test on, an Intel build would ship untested.
1. Download Spare, unzip it and move **Spare.app** to **Applications**.
2. Open it. If macOS blocks it, go to **System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway**, or run `xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Spare.app`. Spare is signed but not notarized yet.
3. Optional: give it **Full Disk Access** so it can also look at Downloads, iPhone backups and other apps' data. Without it, Spare skips the folders macOS protects and says which.
### Uninstall
**Settings › Undo and Uninstall › Uninstall…** lists what Spare changed on your Mac, to tick what to put back first, then moves Spare and its files to the Trash. To undo any single setting yourself, with or without Spare, see Undoing what Spare changed.
Spare is open source under the MIT License. It never deletes anything itself: everything goes to the Trash, and History can put it back. It has no background process and only goes online when you check for updates.
Screenshots in docs/images are made from sample data: `swift build`, run `.build/debug/Spare -demo YES -section Cleanup -AppleLocale en_US`, capture the window, then `swift scripts/marketing.swift work/marketing/icon.png`.
## What it does
Every topic has its own page in the sidebar.
**Free Up Space**
- **Cleanup**: Xcode build data and device support files; node_modules, Rust targets, Swift .build folders and other build folders beside their project file; package manager caches; app caches except macOS's own; the caches Chromium browsers and Electron apps such as Slack and VS Code keep beside their data; copies Mail saved of attachments you opened; logs; crash reports. Things that come back by themselves are selected; caches of open apps, projects touched within a month and anything a running program has open are not. **Your Call** lists old downloads, Messages attachments of 5 MB or more, device backups, Xcode archives and AI models, never selected.
- **Space**: folder sizes from your home folder down.
- **Purgeable Space**: what macOS counts as System Data and gives back by itself when it runs low, part by part as macOS's own clean-up service reports it (Time Machine snapshots, files apps marked purgeable, cloud copies, app container caches, the Spotlight index, thumbnails). **Free Now** asks macOS to remove the files apps marked purgeable and downloads nothing uses any more, one service at a time, after checking that macOS will limit the purge to that service. The service is private to macOS, so it's called from a short-lived child copy of Spare; a change in macOS can then only stop the child. Time Machine's local snapshots are