Penfold Help

Find what takes up space, inspect it, and choose what to remove.

Scan a disk or folder

Choose a location in Overview or the menu bar. Use Scan startup disk for the whole readable startup disk, or Choose folder for another location, including an external drive. Mole’s analyzer installs automatically if needed; basic file discovery remains available if setup fails.

Full-drive scans continue until finished or stopped. Folder scans stop after two minutes or approximately 500,000 entries. Skipped or unreadable locations and partial results are reported. If protected personal folders are missing, enable Penfold in macOS Full Disk Access, restart Penfold and scan again. Cloud-only files are skipped; download them in Finder first if you want them included.

Inspect files and remove only what you choose

Storage offers List and Map views. Open folders to explore their contents. Select a file and use Quick Look or Reveal in Finder to inspect it. In file lists, use Space for Quick Look and Shift or ⌘ to select multiple files.

Choose Move to Trash and review the confirmation before proceeding. Size and modification age are reasons to review, not proof a file is disposable. Keep rules and protected locations block removal. Saved files holds choices retained from earlier versions; new selections can go straight to confirmation.

Moving files to Trash does not free disk space until you empty Trash in Finder. Activity can reveal or restore supported recorded moves while the items remain in Trash. Restoration never overwrites an existing file. Emptying Trash in Finder removes that recovery option.

Logical size and on-disk size are not guaranteed savings: APFS shared blocks, hard links and cloud storage can make them differ. The map groups smaller files and long tails rather than drawing every file. Duplicates has its own whole-location scan, including smaller nonempty files, hidden folders and packages. Exact copies are verified byte for byte; hard links count once. Exclusions, links, cloud-only items and other mounts are skipped. Protected copies can be keepers but cannot be removed. Browse groups and copies using the page buttons; Trash affects only shown removable copies. This is exact matching, not similar-photo detection. What grew compares compatible saved scans; scan again to refresh the inventory after changes.

Developer & AI storage

Cleanup → Developer & AI measures recognized project output, known AI-tool storage and your own temporary items. Nothing is selected automatically. Age reflects modification dates, not last use. Close relevant apps and tools before confirming an eligible group’s move to Trash. Project scans have depth, time and entry limits; partial results are labelled.

Recognized Claude transcripts and old binaries can move to Trash; the current and newest binaries are kept. Codex/OpenCode sessions use their installed command-line tools and can include child sessions. Registered, clean Codex/Claude worktrees use Git only when their commits are preserved elsewhere. Unloaded Ollama models use its local API. Keep and exclusion rules still apply; changed, active or unknown data stays protected. Any age applies to supported AI records; build/cache/temp cleanup retains a seven-day minimum. Penfold does not interpret conversation text to decide what to clean or run automatic cleanup.

Before using an owning tool to remove sessions, worktrees or models, Penfold saves and records a private recovery copy in Trash. History backups can include other conversations and app metadata. Shared-store recovery and Git re-registration are manual: open the recovery copy from Activity and read its instructions; never overwrite newer history. Shared databases have no per-session byte estimate and may not shrink immediately; models can share weights. Space is reclaimed after Trash is emptied, which also removes recovery.

Monitoring, RAM and storage alerts

System and the menu bar show CPU, RAM, memory pressure and startup-disk capacity. Monitoring samples pause when their views are inactive. Free up RAM uses an optional signed helper approved through macOS. It clears disk-cache memory; it does not release active app allocations or guarantee a speedup. Manage the helper in Settings → System.

Enable Low storage alerts in Settings → System and choose a threshold in GB. Allow notifications when macOS asks. Penfold checks once a minute while running, including when its window is closed. It sends one alert per low-space episode and rearms after space recovers 5 GB above the threshold. Quit stops monitoring. Penfold does not launch automatically at login; Focus and notification settings control alert presentation.

Settings and privacy

Scanning: file-size threshold, keep/exclusion rules and the Mole engine. The threshold and exclusions apply on the next scan. System: memory helper and low-storage alerts. AI & integrations: on-device explanations and optional MCP sharing.

MCP sharing is off by default. Enabling it allows connected clients to read a capped metadata inventory, including file names and full paths; clients may forward that data to their AI provider. No file contents, commands or removal tools are exposed. Turning sharing off stops future reads but cannot recall data already disclosed. Apple Intelligence explanations use bounded metadata on supported Macs after an explicit request.

Install an update

Quit Penfold, open the new disk image and replace Penfold in Applications. Local settings and activity remain in your user account. There is currently no automatic updater. Closing the main window leaves the app in the menu bar; choose Quit to exit.

Penfold is independent of Mole and open source under GPL-3.0-or-later. Corresponding source and license information are included on the release disk image.