Mac Mini G4 OS 10.4.11
Over the years I have downloaded various applications/app updates, some of which I use, some of which are just space-hogging crap. How do I go about “cleaning house” and getting some of this dead weight out of here? I’ve poked around on the Apple support pages, but I’m not exactly sure how to ask the question in order to get the right answer!
Is your question, “Which applications can I safely delete?”, or is it “How do I delete an application once I determine that I want to delete it?”?
If you already know what applications you want to delete, you can do so by just dragging them into the trash and emptying the trash. Some support files (user preferences and such detritus) will be left behind, but that stuff, in my experience, is harmless and takes up very little space. If you are really anal about eliminating every last vestige of a deleted application, there are commercial programs such as Spring Cleaning that I think will help.
Tyrrell is correct.
You can use this to see where all your disk space went.
OK I am loving this- have it downloaded and am checking out my “perspective.” I see that there is an option to “delete.” Would this be the same thing as uninstalling? I know there are utilities out there like “AppZapper” that will uninstall stuff for you. Would I need something like that or will Grand Perspective do that same thing for me?
Tyrrell/beowulff, I know I can drag stuff to the trash, but aren’t there all those little “.plist” files I have to get rid of, too?
Most of the space taken up by an application will be in the .app bundle itself (the thing which you can drag to the trash.) If you want to hunt down .plist files and other stuff, you can, but they are typically very small. Most MacOS X applications don’t need to be “uninstalled” as such as they are mostly self-contained in the .app bundle. The exceptions are things which have to install system libraries, frameworks and extensions. For these, you can use the installer program on the original install CD or disk image to uninstall the program.