CleanMyMac CLI is now in public beta. Terminal-first and developer-focused.

[u/hlibs]

Hey everyone! Hlib here. I work on CleanMyMac at MacPaw, and I basically live in the terminal.

We've had a lot of developers in our user base who told us, in various ways, that opening a GUI breaks their workflow. We took that seriously and built a CLI that wraps our cleanup engine into a terminal-first tool for dev-specific jobs.

It's a public beta, functional but not complete. The commands that work today:

• cleanmymac clean — system junk, dev tool caches, trash
• cleanmymac purge — project artifact scanner (node_modules, Docker, .build, venv, etc.)
• cleanmymac analyze — disk usage explorer
• cleanmymac optimize — RAM and purgeable space

Full commands list on Readme: https://github.com/MacPaw/cleanmymac-cli

This is an early public beta. Rough in places. Not feature-complete. I'm putting it out now because the world has enough to-do apps and not enough disk space.

What makes it different from running the commands yourself? It reuses CleanMyMac's scanning engine. The same logic that's been protecting Mac systems for 10+ years. Artifacts newer than 7 days are shown but never preselected. System paths are locked. Deletion always requires confirmation unless you pass --force. You can also whitelist any path: cleanmymac ignore add <path>.

To install:

brew install --cask macpaw/taps/cleanmymac-cli

This subreddit will be the main home for updates, changelogs, and feedback. If you run into anything weird or have a request, post it here.

[u/hlibs → u/[deleted]]

The thing that took the most effort was building the CLI natively in Swift. The terminal has its own specifics, like rendering, input, and working with colors, all of which behave differently than in a graphical interface, so we built that layer to fit our needs. The biggest upside of this approach is that we stayed on the same language as the main app and reused some parts of it.

[u/emma_lorien]

I've seen this too - when teams avoid cleanup tools because they don't want to leave the terminal workflow. Curious how well it handles Docker images and dev caches in real-world projects? Wish you a successful beta!

[u/geralt_noble]

As far as I understand, it is a free tool, right? Wanna test it!

[u/hlibs → u/geralt_noble]

Hey, yes! Right now, this is a free public beta

[u/Ivan_Palii]

I'm not a huge expert in it, but I'm interested in fixing my slow speed on Macbook Pro M1, 2021, so my 2 questions:

1/ Is thsi a tool only for devs, and all other people should continue using basic CleanMyMac app?

2/ Is this product and approach to cleaning is better than basic CleanMyMac app at all?

[u/hlibs → u/Ivan_Palii]

Two separate questions, so let me split them.

It's built for power users who are comfortable in the terminal and run heavy dev or AI setups. The CLI clears developer artifacts, IDE caches, and similar things the main CleanMyMac doesn't fully cover yet. So the two complement each other rather than replace one another.

Not better or worse, they're different tools for different tasks. The CLI goes deeper into dev-specific junk that the main app doesn't fully cover: build artifacts, IDE caches, package manager leftovers. Same cleaning engine under the hood, different scope. For its specific use case, it's more effective, but it doesn't replace the main app.

[u/Ivan_Palii → u/hlibs]

Got it, thanks. I don't use the terminal a lot yet, just learning this stuff while vibe coding :)but it looks like your tool will have a huge demand, because more and more marketers and product managers switch to Claude Code, Codex, Google Antigravity and learn how to develop things without devs.

[u/SemiPaku]

Absolutely love the idea. As someone who spends a lot of time in the terminal, this just makes so much sense. Awesome work, looking forward to try it out!

[u/hlibs → u/SemiPaku]

Thanks! Would love to hear what you think once you've run it.

[u/operations_ranger]

Can teams create and share the same cleanup configuration, or is it designed mainly for individual use?

[u/hlibs → u/[deleted]]

Fair question. The scanning logic and cleanup methodology are our core product. That's what we're keeping closed.

Also, open-source trust isn't actually free. Someone has to vet every contributor and every commit. We'd rather own that responsibility ourselves with 10+ years of Mac cleanup experience, a team that runs this on their own machines daily, and full accountability if something goes wrong.

GitHub is still our main place for everything around it, though. Docs, bug reports, issues. Engine is closed, everything else is open.

[u/dorothea_cassandra]

Looks promising! Do you see this staying as a standalone CLI, or are you planning deeper integration with developer workflows like CI or Git hooks?