alt Hacker NewsIn the file menu of the installer, there is generally an option to see all the files it is placing on the system with full system paths. I generally note this down so I can make sure to clean things up completely if/when needed.
For app that just get dragged into the Applications folder, they end up doing all this additional file creation on first-launch instead of via an installer. That actually makes it harder. For those I tend to search the ~/Library folder for the name of the app and the company that made it, hoping I find all the remnants to delete. There are apps, like AppZapper and AppCleaner, which try to automate this process. I still think it’s ridiculous that Apple never solved for this. It’s one of the reasons I always do a manual migration to a new Mac. It feels like the only real way to clean things up.
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I'll have to check that installer trick the next time I use one.
Isn't the "Receipts" folder that so angered OP kind of that same thing? I thought those included the list of files installed.
In general, I think some worries about removing "every trace" are overblown, though. The receipts, for instance, are inert and they're not filling up the disk or consuming RAM.
Of all the things Apple does in the name of "security" it's funny to me that they've never even tried to build uninstallation functionality. Even though a majority of apps with "Installers" use, not arbitrary installer executables like Windows, but .pkg files that open with Apple's "Installer" app. That means it's Apple's code placing most of those files in place, and even if the install includes a "script" portion, it seems like a solvable problem that Installer.app could monitor the files being added or changed by the script process, to at least let you view a log of what happened if not reverse the changes.
> I still think it’s ridiculous that Apple never solved for this.
I think that problem, in general, is unsolvable on the Mac. The OS cannot know whether a file that an application creates is a user file that should be kept on uninstall or an application one that, maybe, should be deleted on uninstall.
(Maybe because Apple’s guidelines say (or at least used to say) uninstall ers, if you have one, should keep preferences files around, in case a user reinstalls the app later. Also, applications may ship with files (e.g. fonts, sounds, picture libraries) that users may want to keep around)
> For app that just get dragged into the Applications folder, they end up doing all this additional file creation on first-launch instead of via an installer
For quite a few things that an installer can install, applications cannot do that, as they want to install them into protected directories.
I think most of the leftovers whose locations you cannot gauge from looking at the file list in the installer are for caches, preferences, logs, etc.