tw93/Mole

🐹 Clean, uninstall, analyze, optimize, and monitor your Mac. Free open-source CLI, plus a native Mac app

Summary

Mole is an open-source CLI toolkit (mo) that bundles Mac cleanup, uninstall, disk analysis, optimization, and live system monitoring into one terminal workflow. It targets macOS 12 and newer with both Intel and Apple Silicon support, and a separate Windows branch ships an equivalent command set.

What it is useful for

Engineers who prefer the terminal get a single tool for the tasks that typically require several GUI apps. mo clean clears user and app caches, browser caches, logs, and remnants from apps that are no longer installed. mo uninstall removes an app together with related LaunchAgents and preferences, defaulting to sending files to Trash. mo analyze opens an interactive disk explorer (with Vim keys, filtering, Finder preview, and Trash moves) that can also target a path such as mo analyze /private/tmp for user-owned temp review, and emits JSON for scripted reporting. mo optimize runs bounded maintenance like DNS cache flush, QuickLook and icon cache refresh, and database optimize. mo status shows live CPU, memory, disk I/O, network, power, and zombie-process stats, with per-snapshot JSON or NDJSON streaming via mo status --watch --interval 2s. mo purge removes rebuildable project artifacts (node_modules, target, .build, dist) across configured scan roots, and mo slim strips Intel code from signed universal apps on Apple Silicon.

How engineers can use it

Install with brew install mole or the README's curl one-liner. Run mo for an interactive menu, or invoke a subcommand directly. Before any deletion, run with --dry-run (and add --debug for verbose logs), review history with mo history or mo history --json, and protect caches with mo clean --whitelist. For automation, mo status --json, mo analyze --json, and mo uninstall --list produce machine-readable output. AI-agent users can install the published skill with npx skills add tw93/Mole -a claude-code codex cursor -g -y so cleanups always surface a dry-run first.

The README documents caveats that matter for scripting: analyzer results carry a scan_status field (complete, partial, unavailable) because partial scans are not retried or cached; mo uninstall keeps personal data unless --with-data is passed and never edits shell, Hook, or MCP configs; mo slim skips App Store, Apple, running, and Rosetta-bound apps. License is GPL-3.0. The mo update and mo remove commands only manage the installation they were invoked from, so Nix-managed installs stay under Nix control.