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Winnow Support

Stuck or curious? Email hello@papermint.studio and a human reads every message, usually within a day.

Install. Download Winnow, open the .dmg and drag Winnow to Applications. It needs macOS 15 or later and runs on Apple silicon and Intel.
The first scan. Winnow measures your home folder and Applications when it opens, which takes about a minute on a well-used Mac. It only reads: nothing changes until you choose something and confirm.
Full Disk Access (optional). Some folders, like Mail, Messages, Safari and the Trash, need it to be measured. The welcome and Settings open System Settings › Privacy & Security › Full Disk Access; turn on Winnow there (or press + and pick it from Applications). Winnow notices when you come back and scans again.
The menu bar. With Show Winnow in the menu bar on (Settings), closing the window keeps Winnow there: click its icon for free space and what you can clear. Turn it off and closing the window quits Winnow.

Clear now is what comes back by itself when something needs it: app caches, logs, Xcode build data, simulator caches, and package caches for Yarn, npm, pip, Homebrew, CocoaPods, Swift packages, Gradle and Go. These are ticked for you.
Your call is safe to remove but costs something: old iPhone and Watch device support, Xcode archives, browsers for test tools, the pnpm store, Rust crates, Hugging Face models, node_modules in projects that haven't changed in 90 days, installers in Downloads, simulators that can't run any more, and the Trash. None of these are ticked for you.
Kept for you is listed so you know, and never removed from Clean: iPhone and iPad backups (manage them in Finder), Docker's disk (clear it from Docker) and Ollama models (remove them with ollama rm).
What is this? Select a row to see what it is in plain words, what's inside (build data by project, caches by app, node_modules by project) and what happens when it goes.
Never touched. Your documents, Desktop, iCloud Drive, the Photos library, Mail and Messages, keychains, and macOS's own caches.
Developer shows the same rows, filtered to developer tools.

Everything goes to the Trash first. Winnow moves files to the Trash and remembers where each one lived, in a small file in its folder.
Restore. History lists every clean-up. Restore puts every file back exactly where it was. If something new is already in that place, Winnow leaves it and keeps the old copy in the Trash.
When the space comes back. Files in the Trash still take space until it's emptied. Winnow empties only its own items after 7 days (or 1 or 30, or never: Settings › Safety net), and never anything else you put in the Trash. Empty in History does it straight away.
Free it now. The confirm window's Free it now moves the files to the Trash and empties them at once, for when you need the space today. Those can't be restored.
Not through the Trash. Simulators that can't run any more are removed with Xcode's own simctl, and emptying the Trash is final; the confirm window says so before you go ahead.

Everything it left. Pick an app on the Apps page to see every file it put in your Library: settings, caches, containers, saved state, logs, login helpers and more.
Sure or Likely. A file is Sure when its name carries the app's bundle ID, or when it's a group container from the same signing team. It's Likely when only the developer's ID or the app's name matches. Sure files are ticked for you; Likely files are for you to decide.
The best match wins. Each file goes to the one app it matches best, so an app called Notion doesn't take Notion Calendar's files. When two apps match a file equally, neither gets it.
Quit first. Winnow won't uninstall an app that's open; quit it and try again.
Left behind. Apps you deleted earlier often leave settings and caches. They're listed under Left behind when they look like an app's (a settings file or a container, not just a cache) and no app on your Mac answers to them. Click one to move its files to the Trash.

Space. Click a folder to open it in the next column; the last three levels show at once. Sizes are real space on disk, with files stored more than once (hard links) counted once and other disks (like simulator runtimes) left out. Move to Trash and Show in Finder act on the selected folder.
Locked folders show a small lock: part of them needs Full Disk Access to be measured.
System Data. Storage settings shows one grey bar; Winnow splits it into app caches, logs, apps' own data, iPhone backups, purgeable space and swap, and calls the rest macOS and the rest. That last part is an estimate: the disk's used space minus everything Winnow can measure, because macOS doesn't publish its own number.
Time Machine snapshots on your disk are listed under System Data. macOS removes them by itself when space runs low, and doesn't report a size for each one.

Try it first. Every feature works for 7 days from the first launch.
Pay once. $9.99 for one Mac, or $19.99 for up to three, with every future update included. Buy from Settings › Licence, the sidebar's Buy, or when you try to remove something after the trial; the payment is handled by Dodo Payments.
After the trial scanning, Space, System Data and Restore keep working. Clearing, uninstalling and moving things to the Trash need a licence.
Activating. After checkout Winnow opens with your key filled in; press Activate. Or paste the key from the Dodo Payments email into Settings › Licence.
Moving to a new Mac. Press Deactivate… in Settings on the old Mac, or remove it at console.papermint.studio, then activate on the new one. Reinstalling on the same Mac doesn't use another place.
All your licences are at console.papermint.studio (also Winnow › Manage Licences…): your keys, the Macs each is on, and your receipts.
Offline is fine. Winnow checks its licence about once a day when it's online, and keeps working for 30 days without a connection.

Automatic. Winnow checks once a day for a new version and installs it inside the app when you choose; it restarts in a few seconds with your history intact.
Check now from Winnow › Check for Updates… or Settings › Updates.
Signed updates. Every update is signed by us and notarized by Apple, and Winnow refuses anything that isn't.

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