Mole: The Utility I Didn’t Know My Mac Needed

I recently discovered a small macOS utility called Mole, and it very quickly earned a permanent place in my setup.

I first heard about it while listening to a ChangeLog podcast titled Kaizen! Let it crash. One of the hosts casually mentioned Mole as a tool they’d had great luck with, and that was enough to send me digging. I’ve tried plenty of Mac “cleanup” utilities over the years. Some are beautiful. Some are functional. Most eventually hit you with a paywall or subscription right when you actually need them.

Mole felt different almost immediately.

My M1 MacBook isn’t slow—not even close. Apple silicon still holds up incredibly well. But after years of installs, experiments, abandoned apps, and random tooling, it was clearly overdue for some TLC. I wasn’t looking to wipe my machine or reinstall macOS. I just wanted to clean house properly without blowing everything up.

That’s where Mole really shines.

Its real value, at least for me, was truly uninstalling apps and aggressively cleaning caches, logs, and leftover system junk. Not just removing an app bundle, but all the hidden remnants that quietly pile up over time. On my first run, Mole reclaimed over 70GB of cached data—which immediately justified the install. (why was my slack cache over 500mb??)

Mole is multiple utilities rolled into one: deep cleaning, a smart uninstaller, disk usage insights, and live system monitoring—all in a single, lightweight binary.

No bloat. No upsell. No account creation. Just a free tool that does its job well and gets out of the way.

Software like this reminds me how good small, focused utilities can be. Huge shout-out to tc39—I’ll definitely be keeping Mole in my core Homebrew installs.