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Apps from the Mac App Store can’t see your files until you pick them yourself. On first launch click Scan Macintosh HD… and, in the window that opens, click Scan without selecting anything else — it already points at your disk. You can also drag your disk from Finder and drop it on the Anillo window.

You only do this once; Anillo remembers. It never asks for your password.

Anillo needs the startup disk itself (usually called “Macintosh HD”), not a folder inside it. In the open window, choose your disk in the sidebar or press ⇧⌘C and select it, then click Scan.

Yes. With the Anillo window open, choose Help → Welcome Tour from the menu bar.

Only anonymous crash reports and a few usage numbers (how many files were deleted, how much space was freed, how long a scan took), so bugs get fixed. Never file names, folder paths or contents. You can turn it off in Settings → Privacy (⌘,); see the privacy policy for the details.

It’s optional. macOS keeps some data — Mail, Messages, Safari, other apps’ private data — hidden from every app, even after you grant the disk. Without it that space is reported as “hidden”.

To include it: open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access, turn on Anillo, then scan again. Anillo still only reads names and sizes.

The grey hatched slice in the chart (and the “Not measurable” row in the list) is space that is in use but that no readable file accounts for: local Time Machine snapshots, purgeable caches that macOS frees on its own, and folders Anillo isn’t allowed to read. It cannot be deleted from Anillo. Click it for an explanation; turning on Full Disk Access (see above) lets Anillo measure the protected folders.

Yes. In the Analyze tab, the Everything menu next to Rescan filters the chart and the list to one kind of file: apps, images, videos, audio, PDFs, documents, archives and installers, disk images and virtual machines, code, or everything else. Folder sizes then show only that kind. Files smaller than the scan detail setting (1 MB by default) are summed per folder and are not counted in a filter.

Every whole-disk scan is compared with the one before it. The History tab lists your scans and, for each, what appeared, disappeared or changed size since the previous scan — files and folders separately, biggest changes first. Files that only moved (same name and size in a new place) are counted apart. The comparison data is stored on your Mac only; Settings → History shows how much space it uses and can clear it.

Finder adds up file sizes. Anillo measures the space actually used on disk: files duplicated in Finder (APFS clones) share their blocks and are counted once, hard links are counted once, compressed and sparse files count at their real size, and cloud files that aren’t downloaded count as the little they occupy. Anillo’s figure is what deleting would really give you back.

To stay fast and light, Anillo sums up files under 1 MB per folder instead of tracking each one. Click the “Smaller files” row to list them. You can change the cut-off in Settings → Scanning.

Drag items onto the Basket at the bottom of the window, or right-click and choose Add to Basket. They disappear from the chart and the Basket shows how much you would free. Nothing is touched on disk until you press Delete and confirm. Put Back returns everything.

A tab for developers. It lists your Xcode installs, simulator runtimes and devices, device-support folders, the caches of tools such as Swift Package Manager, CocoaPods, npm, pnpm, Homebrew, Gradle and Cargo, and the build folders of your projects (node_modules, Pods, .build, DerivedData, .next…) found in your home folder. Anillo keeps the newest release of every major version and flags the rest as superseded; build folders of projects untouched for a month are flagged too. Mark anything Keep and it is never suggested again. Simulator runtimes belong to macOS, and Docker and pnpm stores must be pruned by their own tool, so for those Anillo copies the Terminal command and explains why instead of deleting them itself.

Each category has an Auto-clean switch. When you turn it on (after a confirmation that shows what is flagged right now), the category’s flagged items are moved to the Trash immediately and then once a day while Anillo is running, and you get a notification each time. Items you marked Keep, a running Xcode and its DerivedData are never touched. Everything goes to the Trash, so you can put it back until you empty it.

A few possible reasons: you chose Move to Trash (the space returns when you empty the Trash); a local Time Machine snapshot still references the data (macOS releases it within about a day); or the files shared blocks with copies you kept. Press Rescan for a fresh picture.

Folders macOS depends on — System, Library, Applications, your home folder itself and a few others — are protected inside Anillo on purpose. You can still open them and remove individual items inside your own folders.

There are two cases. If the message mentions an administrator password, the item belongs to the system: App Store apps can’t ask for that password, so use Reveal in Finder and delete it there.

Otherwise macOS handed Anillo your disk without permission to change it. Click Choose the Disk Again… in the message (or Choose Disk… on the start screen) and confirm your disk in the window that opens. If it still fails, quit Anillo from the menu bar icon and open it again.

Only if you chose Move to Trash: open the Trash in Finder and use Put Back. Delete Permanently cannot be undone.

In the Monitors tab choose Add Folder…, pick a folder and a size limit. Anillo measures it on a schedule (5 to 60 minutes, in Settings) and sends a notification the first time it crosses the limit. It alerts again only after the folder has dropped back under the limit.

Yes, if you ask it to. When adding or editing a monitor, turn on Automatic clean-up, choose whether the folder’s contents go to the Trash or are deleted permanently, and set a second limit. It must be higher than the alert limit, so you always get the warning first. When the folder passes that second limit, Anillo empties it (the folder itself stays, and anything macOS protects is left alone) and sends a notification saying how much it freed. It is off unless you switch it on, and never offered for Docker and similar data that must be cleaned with their own tools.

Check System Settings → Notifications → Anillo and allow notifications, and check that a Focus mode isn’t silencing them. Monitors only run while Anillo is open — closing the window is fine, it keeps watching from the menu bar. Turn on Settings → Open Anillo at login to keep it running.

The folder was deleted or moved to another disk. Remove the monitor from its ••• menu and add the folder again.

Any Mac running macOS 15 or later, Apple silicon or Intel. Anillo analyzes the internal startup disk.

Quit Anillo from its menu bar icon, then move it to the Trash from the Applications folder. To also remove its settings and monitor history, delete the folder ~/Library/Containers/com.itaysoft.borrado.