My Mac froze because its disk was full, and nothing I had could tell me why. Diskling is the app I wanted that day. It tells you what’s filling your Mac in plain words, and cleans up without the fear of breaking something.
- Explain first, clean second
- Your files stay on your Mac
- Nothing removed without a way back
- Numbers you can trust
Why Diskling exists
It started with my own Mac. One afternoon a full disk froze it, and it restarted on its own. Storage settings said most of the space was System Data, and none of the apps I had could tell me what that meant. The whole story is in The 186 GB that wasn’t.
Then I started asking around. Friends and colleagues had the same story: the disk suddenly almost full, and no idea where the space went.
I tried the apps that already exist. Some draw a beautiful map of the disk and stop at System Data. Some clean with one big button and red warnings, and you hope nothing important was in there. None of them told me, in plain words, what a folder was and whether it was safe to remove.
So I’m building the app I wanted that day. It explains first and cleans second: what a folder is, who made it, and what happens if it goes, before it asks you to press anything.
What I believe
- Explain before you clean. You should know what something is before you remove it. Plain words, not pie charts.
- Your Mac, your files. Scans run on your Mac, and nothing is uploaded. You don’t need an account.
- Safe beats fast. The Trash comes first, and every cleanup has a way back.
- Honest numbers. If Diskling says you got space back, it measured the disk again to be sure.
- Respect the Mac. Native, quick, and quiet. No fake speed boosts, no memory cleaners, no nagging.
Who’s behind it
I’m Shameem Reza. By day I’m a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, where I help WooCommerce store owners fix problems they can’t see. I’m also on the WordPress.org Plugin Review Team, checking plugins for security and quality before they go live in the plugin directory.
Both jobs come down to what Diskling is built to do: find what’s wrong, explain it plainly, and fix it without breaking anything.
Diskling is my own project, separate from my work at Automattic. More about me at shameemreza.com.
Built in public
Working in the open is something I picked up at Automattic, where our CEO Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, has always made it the default. So Diskling is built in public.
It’s in development, and there’s no release date yet. I share progress on the blog and on X.
The rules Diskling uses to recognize folders are public on GitHub in diskling/rules. Know a folder it should explain? Open an issue there.