How to COMPLETELY uninstall certain apps

[simonvee]

With all sincerity, I am starting to appreciate Mac more than I do with Windows, despite the fact that I've only used it for one week. I enjoy it's simplicity. The files are neatly categorized. There are no blank files in C drive like Windows with seemingly serve no purpose. The purpose of this thread was to have a discussion to expand my knowledge about OSX and to ultimately determine whether there is a solution around this or is it an innate flaw.

 

[mrplow]

I'll disagree and say it's not a flaw, for the reasons I've given in my previous (seemingly unread) posts.

A flaw suggests a mistake, an error, a limitation. But the plists are left there on purpose by the OS as they are not part of the original install. If an application developer wishes to remove the plist then they can provide an uninstaller.

As to a solution. If you, as the end user, wishes to remove them you can (as described above). But that's a solution to your expectation that a plist file would be removed rather than a solution to a flaw.

 

[simonvee]

1) How then would you locate the plist files to delete? Namely, where do I search?

2) Which application would you know would or would not involve the straight forward method of uninstallation (ie. click and drag to trash)?

 

[mrplow]

The answers to both those questions have been covered, at least once already in this thread

 

[simonvee]

Yes, Appcleaner. I have already installed it yesterday. It worked great.
My question now is without the app, how does Mac allow you to locate and delete plist files? If there is no method of doing it then the OS neglected users options.

 

[mrplow]

Sorry but the links provided in posts on this thread and bobtomays post go into significant detail about installing and uninstalling apps on OSX. Including location of plists

 

[simonvee]

library/preferences. Fair enough. My mistake

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Yes, Appcleaner. I have already installed it yesterday. It worked great.
My question now is without the app, how does Mac allow you to locate and delete plist files? If there is no method of doing it then the OS neglected users options.

I'm sure you are aware that in Windows, even if you use the built-in uninstallation process, many files get left behind. Worse... registry entries get left behind. In most cases, those files that get left behind serve the same purpose as the plist (preference) files that get left behind in OS X. I should point out that even the uninstaller in Windows follows a process set in place by the developer of each app, if I recall correctly on this anyway.

For the sake of simplicity, Apple has simply left this to individual developers and 3rd parties to address. Some developers include an uninstaller, and a small few actually have a menu item to do a complete uninstallation if you like (iStat Menus comes to mind). But these are fairly uncommon. So this is where 3rd parties come to play. Uninstallation assistants like AppCleaner do a pretty good job, but themselves aren't perfect. In particular, they typically don't look for "support" files in other user accounts on your Mac. TinkerTool System is the only one I know of that does do that. But this is about as good as it gets. I have never seen one that gets everything every time, most notably they seem to skip files/folder that are shared for multiple apps from a single developer, and really they should skip those.

If you really want to get obsessive over it, use EasyFind to scour your drive by searching for the name of the software and for the developer's name, then manually delete any strays you find.

EDIT: One last tip... you can set AppCleaner to automatically screen for apps dragged to your Trash. It will then look for "helper" files and offer to delete those too automatically. I don't use this myself because it gets in the way sometimes, but I have bound a system-wide shortcut to "open" an app with AppCleaner rather than move to the Trash if I know I'm done with it (this is a fairly advanced trick I did involving Automator and System Services).

 

[MacInWin]

All the posts have covered this topic pretty exhaustively, but I'll add that your reference to remembering Skype logins may be associated more with the Keychain than any incomplete uninstallation. You can open Keychain Access and delete the entry for Skype, if it bothers you.

And I don't see the plist issue as a design flaw. The application can name the plist whatever it wants to, so there is no way that OSX (or Appcleaner, for that matter) can absolutely KNOW what files are associated with the application. Appcleaner (and all the other uninstall helpers) make an educated guess at what it thinks are the associated files and then presents them to YOU so that it is YOUR responsibility for any damage done by deleting the wrong files. It gets it right most of the time, but you still have to understand that 1) there may be other files left behind and 2) the files it is deleting may or may not be the right ones.

Given the small size of the debris left behind, I don't bother with it. I doubt all of the leftovers add up to 1Mb total on my machine that I've been running since 2006.

 

[toMACsh]

library/preferences. Fair enough. My mistake

Users/YOU/Library/Preferences to be more precise. Your Mac has more than one Library folder.