What's new — Shodhana

Shodhana 0.6.4

2 October 2026

Two things that looked like caches are now left alone

Some apps keep identity and diagnostic state in your caches folder, and deleting it while they run can leave them writing to disk without stopping. Those folders are no longer offered. A package manager's downloads are kept while it is still running, so a clean can't break an install in progress.

Uninstalling removes what it says it will

When you uninstall an app, the review now lists exactly what goes, and all of it goes. Data that Shodhana normally protects while an app is installed, such as a virtual machine's disk or a VPN's settings, is included when you are removing that app, and everything still goes to the Trash first. Background helpers are removed only when they belong to the app you are removing, not just because they share its maker's name.

Honest sizes when a folder can't be fully read

In Disk Explorer, a folder that contains parts Shodhana isn't allowed to read now shows its size as "at least", instead of a smaller number that looks exact. Giving Shodhana Full Disk Access lets it measure all of it.

More for developers

The Development page now lists emulator system images and says which ones your emulators still use. Extension packages your editor downloaded are found too, and container figures no longer promise space that clearing them wouldn't actually free.

Shodhana 0.6.3

2 October 2026

Finds more of what developer tools leave behind

Compilers, AI coding assistants and packaging tools keep caches and scratch files that are rebuilt as soon as they are needed again. Shodhana now finds more of them, along with editor extensions your editor no longer uses and downloads that an app's updater started but never finished. As before, a tool that is still running keeps its files until it stops.

Uninstalling is more thorough, and safer with two copies installed

When you remove an app, Shodhana now also finds preferences, saved window state and data folders that the app named after itself rather than after its identifier.

If you have two copies of the same app installed, such as a beta next to the regular version, both are now listed. Removing one leaves the other copy's settings and data alone, because they share them. Apps from the iPhone and iPad App Store that run on your Mac are now recognised too, so their data is never mistaken for something a removed app left behind.

Careful with folders that sync to other devices

Build output inside a folder that syncs to your other devices, such as iCloud Drive, is still listed but never selected for you. Deleting it here deletes it everywhere. The row says which service syncs it.

Cleaner Development page

The thin lines under the emulator and simulator rows, which looked like broken dividers, are gone.

Shodhana 0.6.2

2 October 2026

Results appear while the scan runs

The categories that hold most of your reclaimable space used to arrive all at once at the end of a scan, so the list looked frozen for most of a minute. They now fill in as each project and tool is measured, starting with the folders in your home folder. Projects on several drives are measured side by side, so a full scan also finishes sooner. Items are selected for you once their category has finished.

Looks at home on the latest macOS

Shodhana again uses the current macOS design: the sidebar floats inside the window and the Clean button stands out as it should.

Never cleans under an app that is still writing

Some developer tools and design apps keep working in the background after their window closes, writing to their caches as they go. While one of them is running, its caches are shown but can't be selected, with the reason beside them. Shodhana checks again at the moment of cleaning, so a tool that starts after the scan still stops the clean.

More of your own data is off limits

Calendar, contacts and account data are now never offered for cleaning, and neither are the folders where command-line tools are installed. A launcher's extensions, snippets and clipboard history are protected too.

Smarter package-manager cleanup

Downloaded installers are still cleared, but the index a package manager needs to install anything is kept, so your next install doesn't start with a long re-download. When a tool keeps several versions of itself, the one you actually run is always kept.

Shodhana 0.6.1

30 September 2026

Cleaning now frees the space it says it frees

Caches, temporary files and build output rebuild themselves, so a copy of them in the Trash only moved the problem: the space stayed taken until you emptied the Trash. They are now deleted outright. Your own files (large files, installers, leftovers of removed apps) still go to the Trash. The review says which applies to each group before you confirm.

When something does go to the Trash, the result says "Moved to the Trash" rather than "Freed", and offers to empty it with the size shown first. The free-space figure is measured from the disk after every clean instead of estimated. History uses the same wording.

Because this changes what the licence agreement says about the Trash, you will be asked to accept the updated agreement once.

Finds leftovers other tools abandon

Some tools write a fresh copy of their work into your temporary folder every time they run and never remove the old one. Those leftovers could quietly take tens of gigabytes. A new Temporary Files category finds them, and never touches anything an app still has open.

Selects what you are not using

Developer caches and build output are selected by default only once they have gone unused for a month. Deleting the cache a tool used this morning only makes it rebuild tomorrow. Every row shows when it was last used. Build output on an external drive is listed but no longer selected, because deleting it frees space on that drive and not on your Mac. Project folders are found by what they contain, not by what they are called.

Development: free space directly from the page

Every row the page can act on now has a visible button that says what it does and how much it frees: clear a build cache, delete an emulator's Quick Boot snapshots or wipe its data, delete a simulator runtime, clean up a package manager's old versions. Each action runs through the tool that owns the data. A button appears only where the evidence says the item can go; anything in use keeps its options one step further away, and a running emulator offers nothing until it is closed.

Fixed: the window could get stuck after a clean

After a clean, the result could appear cut off with no way to close it, leaving the rest of the window unresponsive. The result now always fits, and Esc closes it.

Fixed: a scan that never finished

Without Full Disk Access, a scan could wait indefinitely on a system permission prompt. It no longer waits.

Shodhana 0.6.0

20 September 2026

New: Development — what your Mac has installed, with the evidence

A new page lists the developer state a cleanup should never guess about: Android emulators, iOS simulators, Docker's disk, and every installed version of your build tools and SDKs. Each version says how many of your own projects ask for it. A version nothing asks for is marked. A version a build used this month is never called stale, even when the project that used it lives on another disk.

Nothing on this page is preselected. Removing an item goes through the tool that owns it, and the confirmation names that tool, so nothing is left believing something exists that does not. The page fills in section by section as each one finishes measuring.

Projects on external drives now count. Shodhana looks for project folders on every mounted disk, not only your home folder, and you can add folders of your own in Settings.

Fixed: rows that all had the same name

Developer-tool caches used to appear as a column of identical names that only a hash told apart. Each row is now named after what it actually holds: the package a one-off run installed, the project a build produced, the tool version a cache belongs to. The tool itself is a tag beside the name.

Fixed: a cleaned folder that kept showing its old size

If you cleaned something while the first scan of the session was still running, Explore and the space map could keep showing the size from before the clean until the next day. The scan finishing later overwrote what the clean had corrected. That can no longer happen.

Fixed: an emulator you use every day read as untouched for months

An emulator session writes into its disk image in place, which the old check did not see. "Last used" now reflects the newest file inside the device.

Cleaning tells a shared store from a stale version

A dependency store that every version of a tool relies on is now told apart from a superseded version: it is marked higher-risk and never preselected, because deleting it costs a re-download for every project, while deleting one old version costs one. Version caches say plainly that the next build recreates them.

Faster to reopen, honest about size

The launch scan is kept between launches, so reopening the app is quick, and a single removal no longer throws that work away. Sizes are measured by what a folder occupies on disk rather than what its files claim, so sparse disk images no longer inflate totals.

Explore accounts for the whole disk

The space map reconciles against what the disk reports as used and shows the remainder it cannot attribute, rather than hiding it.

For support

Settings has a copyable diagnostic report that says what Shodhana found and missed on your Mac. Paste it into a support email and we can see what you see.

Shodhana 0.5.1

3 August 2026

Fixed: pasting a licence key from the purchase email

Purchase emails wrap the licence key across several lines, and pasting that into the key field could make it look empty even though the key was there. The field now grows to show the whole key, and any stray line breaks or spaces from the email are removed automatically — what you see in the field is exactly what gets activated.

Safer with caches that are expensive to rebuild

Some caches look ordinary but cost real time to regenerate — clearing one can mean minutes of stalling the next time you open the app that owns it. Shodhana now recognises these and refuses to touch them: they no longer appear as cleanable, and the deletion engine independently refuses them as well.

Better coverage

Shodhana now finds rebuildable space in more of the apps you use, and a developer-tools cleanup that had quietly stopped being offered on most Macs works again.

As always, only genuinely regenerable material is offered — anything you imported or created is left alone, and nothing is touched while the app that owns it is running.

Shodhana 0.5.0

27 July 2026

New: Explore — follow the space, not a guess

A new Explore view answers "where did my disk go?" one honest folder at a time. Every entry is sized the way the disk actually holds it, so the numbers add up instead of arguing with Finder. Each row draws its share of the folder as a bar, and navigation is the analysis: follow the biggest bar until you recognise the answer.

A breadcrumb trail roots at your home folder, or any mounted volume — every crumb is a jump back up.
The largest files anywhere beneath the current folder are surfaced up front, so a single 4 GB file can't hide three levels down.
Folder sizes are remembered between visits: the first walk of a big disk takes seconds, revisits paint instantly.
Sort by size or by name.

Explore judges as it lists. Anything Clean already covers is marked as such instead of being offered to you twice, rebuildable folders are marked safe to delete, and anything Shodhana refuses to remove wears a Protected badge that tells you why — before you try, not after.

Moving a folder to the Trash from Explore goes through exactly the same safety checks as Clean, lands in History, and stays recoverable until you empty the Trash.

Protection that works from above, too

Shodhana refuses to touch the places where irreplaceable work is kept. Two refinements make that sharper.

Where something is protected only because re-downloading it would be slow rather than impossible, you can now remove it deliberately from Explore, and the confirmation tells you exactly what you are giving up. Everything genuinely irreplaceable stays refused.

The protection now also works upward: trashing a parent folder that contains something protected is refused while the protected item is inside it. Previously the guard could be sidestepped from one level up.

Clean and the deletion engine now always agree — anything the engine would refuse is never offered as cleanable in the first place.

Shodhana 0.4.0

24 July 2026

Cleaning is quieter and better behaved

Cleaning 200 files used to play 200 trash sounds. Now a clean plays the move-to-trash sound once, when it finishes — and permanent deletes get the empty-trash sound instead, so your ears know which mode you're in.

Files that running apps hold open no longer fail with a vague "may be in use" — they move to the Trash cleanly, and the app that owns them simply rebuilds its cache. And when something genuinely can't be cleaned, the results screen now shows the actual reason instead of a guess.

Finds considerably more space

Shodhana now recognises a great deal more reclaimable space than it did: the caches apps rebuild on demand, the copies of themselves that some apps keep after they update, abandoned partial downloads and crash reports, and more of the rebuildable output that development tools leave behind.

All of it follows the same rule as everything else — attributed to whatever put it there, sized, and shown to you with a reason before anything moves.

Safer by default

Leftovers from uninstalled apps now wait until data has clearly been abandoned, and recognise apps installed by the common package managers. Far fewer false leftovers.
Anything credential-adjacent — password managers, SSH, GPG — is never listed, anywhere.
Caches that hold things you'd notice losing, like device and automation settings, are protected out of the box.
A browser that is running is left completely alone during scans.
Security and device-management software is never offered for uninstall. Removing that kind of tool requires the vendor's own uninstaller.
Uninstalling an app now finds more of its true footprint, while never touching command-line tools that outlive a desktop app.

Shodhana 0.3.0

20 July 2026

Build output now tells you whose build it is

This list used to be named after the folder each item sat in, which is technically the truth and no help at all. Two 65 MB rows with the same generic name gave you no way to tell which project you were about to reclaim space from.

Rows are now named after the project that owns the build. If one project produces output for several platforms, all of it is attributed to that project, so you see the app's name rather than a platform's.

Packages inside a larger repository keep their own names instead of being swallowed by the name of the repository.

Tags and locations

Each row now carries a small tag for what produced it, and shows its location underneath. When two projects share a name, the path is what tells them apart.

Fixes

Item counts above a thousand mixed two number formats in one sentence ("10,000 of 10000 items"). They now group consistently.

Shodhana 0.2.0

More kinds of project are recognised. If you write software, Shodhana understands a considerably wider range of development projects than it did, and finds the rebuildable output they leave on your disk.

Every one is checked against the project it belongs to before it is offered. A folder is only ever treated as build output when the project around it proves that is what it is — the same name somewhere else is left alone.

Shodhana 0.1.6

Wording changes to the licence agreement. Nothing about how Shodhana works has changed, and you will not be asked to accept the terms again.

Shodhana 0.1.5

The licence agreement is now shown in full on first launch, rather than summarised. It sets out plainly how removal works and what can go wrong — including that permanently deleted items cannot be recovered by anyone, the developer included. You'll be asked to accept it once.

Moving a licence between Macs is explained more clearly. Replacing a logic board can make a Mac look like new hardware and need reactivating; if you ever run out of moves or a Mac is lost or sold, support will sort it out.

Shodhana 0.1.4

A clearer welcome. The first-run screen now explains how Shodhana works — approval before anything is removed, what stays on your Mac, what your licence covers — rather than leading with disclaimers.

Updates arrive sooner. Shodhana checks for new versions several times a day rather than once. You can turn automatic checks off in Settings › General.

Shodhana 0.1.3

Shodhana now asks you to agree to its terms before it does anything. A short summary of what matters — keep backups, the software is provided as is, what your licence covers, and what does and doesn't leave your Mac — with links to the full documents.

Deactivating a Mac no longer forgets your key. Freeing a slot so you can use your licence elsewhere used to delete the key from this Mac, leaving you hunting through email to get back in. Your key now stays put, and reactivating is one click. You can move a licence up to three times a year.

You can turn off automatic update checks in Settings › General, which also explains exactly what a check sends.

Shodhana 0.1.2

Shodhana now keeps itself up to date. New versions are found and installed automatically, so fixes reach you without you going looking for them.

Settings has been reorganised into General, Cleaning, and License. Your protected paths live under Cleaning, in a list that stays a sensible size no matter how many you add — previously the window kept growing with them.

Shodhana 0.1.1

Your trial is now visible where you work. The Overview shows how many days remain, with a way to buy when you're ready. It stays quiet until the last few days, then makes sure you aren't caught out.

Onboarding no longer asks for a permission you already have. If Full Disk Access was granted before — after a reinstall, for instance — Shodhana now recognises it and gets straight out of the way.

Settings is organised into tabs. General, Cleaning, Safety, and License. Safety keeps everything about what Shodhana may touch — protected paths and disk access — in one place.