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Mole: One Command, 48GB Freed

2 min read
macOS CLI Productivity

Today I discovered Mole and freed 47.89GB of disk space in under two minutes. No subscription. No GUI. Just one command.

My Mac was down to 81GB free on a 460GB drive. I’d been meaning to clean up caches and old build artifacts for weeks but dreaded clicking through CleanMyMac’s upsell screens. Mole solved it with brew install mole and a single mo clean.

What It Found on My Machine

The breakdown was revealing:

User app cache:              9.28GB
Orphaned pnpm store:         6.79GB
uv cache:                    8.42GB
Next.js build caches:       15.34GB  (across 8 projects)
Browser caches:              3.15GB
Discord/Slack/Zoom:          1.68GB
Claude Code old versions:      612MB
npm npx cache:               1.06GB

The Next.js .next directories alone across old projects were eating 15GB. The orphaned pnpm store was 6.79GB of packages for projects I’d already deleted.

The Commands

brew install mole

mo                    # Interactive menu
mo clean              # Deep cleanup (the main one)
mo clean --dry-run    # Preview what it'll remove first
mo uninstall          # Remove apps + all their hidden remnants
mo purge              # Clean node_modules, target, venv from old projects
mo analyze            # Visual disk explorer (moves to Trash, not rm)
mo status             # Live system health dashboard

Why This Over CleanMyMac

MoleCleanMyMac
PriceFree (MIT)$40/year
Installbrew install moleDownload DMG
Categories cleaned92~15
Developer-awareKnows npm, pnpm, uv, Cargo, Next.js, DockerGeneric “Developer Junk”
Dry run--dry-run flagNo equivalent
ScriptableFull CLI, --json outputGUI only

The developer tooling awareness is the killer feature. Mole knows what an orphaned pnpm store is. It knows Claude Code keeps old versions in Application Support. It distinguishes between active Next.js caches and stale ones from deleted projects.

What I Learned

  • mo clean is the everyday command. It scans system, user, browser, developer, and app caches in one pass
  • mo analyze is safer for ad hoc deletion because it moves files to Trash through Finder instead of rm
  • Docker was the elephant in the room: 58.25GB in ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data. Mole flags it but wisely skips it by default
  • The --dry-run flag should always be your first run. Trust but verify
  • mo purge is worth running monthly if you have multiple Node/Rust/Python projects that accumulate build artifacts
  • Navigation supports vim bindings (h/j/k/l), which is a nice touch for a CLI tool

Running out of disk space on your Mac? I’d love to hear what tools you use for cleanup. Reach out on LinkedIn.

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