bleachReclaim orphaned app state on macOS

~/Library fills up with directories belonging to apps you uninstalled months ago. bleach finds them, shows you why it thinks so, and moves them somewhere you can get them back from.

Get started

How it works

GitHub

Evidence, not guesses

Nothing on disk links ~/Library/Application Support/Foo back to an app. bleach gathers evidence from six independent sources and shows you the reasoning behind every verdict.

What it checks

Reversible by default

apply renames paths into a quarantine — an O(1) metadata operation on APFS, so 10 GB moves instantly. Trash and permanent delete are there when you want them, held to identical validation.

Disposal modes

Confined to your home

Candidates outside $HOME are measured and reported but never actionable. bleach never asks for sudo, and three independent layers enforce it.

Scope & safety

Extensible

Rules are YAML, not code. Resolvers are plain executables speaking JSON on stdio — a 40-line script is a complete plugin, and it can never weaken a protection.

Write a plugin

What it found on one real machine

A single scan of the development machine — 128 GB measured across ~/Library and the dotfile directories:

CACHE-SAFE 12.8G (47)   ORPHAN? 2.3G (22)   REVIEW 65.4G (343)   PROTECTED 50.3G (2786)

TIER       SIZE   AGE    WHERE            NAME                        OWNER
ORPHAN?     854M  20mo   app-support      com.isaacmarovitz.Whisky    —
ORPHAN?     286M  6mo    app-support      dev.warp.Warp-Stable        —
ORPHAN?     176M  6mo    dotdirs          .kiro                       —
ORPHAN?     152M  19mo   dotdirs          .azuredatastudio            —
ORPHAN?     122M  2y     app-support      com.wondershare.Installer   —

Every one of those five was verified genuinely uninstalled. But orphans turned out to be only part of the story — the tool also found ~50 GB belonging to tools that ship their own cleanup commands, and reports those rather than reimplementing their retention policy:

Delegate these — the tool knows its own retention policy:
  11.5G   Homebrew           brew cleanup --prune=all
   8.0G   .espressif         reinstall via the ESP-IDF installer when next needed
   3.6G   .m2                rm -rf ~/.m2/repository
   1.8G   pnpm               pnpm store prune

Four kinds of dead weight

Orphaned apps are the obvious case. They are not the biggest one.

Class	Example	How it's found
Orphaned owner — the app is gone	Whisky, 854 MB, untouched 20 months	no inventory source claims it
Version orphans — app installed, old version's state abandoned	`IntelliJIdea2025.3` beside `2026.2`	version-stripped sibling detection
Regenerable caches	`Caches/lens-desktop-updater`, 1 GB	rules plus an owner-installed check
Intra-app dead state	8 of 54 Claude Code session directories whose projects were deleted	plugins

That last row is worth dwelling on. The bundled claude-code-sessions plugin decodes session directory names back into project paths and checks whether the project still exists on disk. "The project this belongs to was deleted" is categorical; "untouched for 200 days" is merely circumstantial.

Install

# Download the latest release
curl -fsSL https://github.com/emdzej/bleach/releases/latest/download/bleach-macos-universal.tar.gz \
  | tar xz
sudo mv bleach /usr/local/bin/

bleach scan

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/emdzej/bleach.git && cd bleach
swift build -c release
cp .build/release/bleach /usr/local/bin/

Scanning is always read-only. See Getting started.