Molekit

Small mole. Big cleanup.
A native macOS window for the Mole (mo) CLI.

Molekit is a SwiftUI front end for Mole, the open-source Mac cleaner by tw93. It never decides on its own what to delete: every scan and every cleanup is a mo command, so Mole's own safety rules always apply. Molekit shows what Mole found, lets you untick what you want to keep, and runs Mole for you.

Molekit is an independent project. It is not made by, affiliated with, or endorsed by the author of Mole or by mole.fit, the official Mole for Mac app.

Why Molekit

• No deletion engine of its own. Molekit never removes files itself; every cleanup is a mo command, so all of Mole's protections apply. The one file it writes is Mole's whitelist, and only for the categories you untick (see below).
• Private. No analytics, no crash reporting, no accounts. The only network request is the optional Mole update check.
• Native and light. Swift and SwiftUI, no Electron or web view. The mole mascot is drawn in code.
• Honest about interactive steps. Where Mole wants your confirmation (uninstall, slim, installers), Molekit shows a preview and then hands you a real terminal inside the window, instead of faking your answers.
• Built to survive Mole updates. JSON fields are optional and text parsing is covered by tests, so a new Mole version degrades gracefully instead of crashing the app.

Features

Screen	What it does	Mole command
Clean	Scans, shows every category live with its size, lets you untick categories and expand them to the exact folders, then cleans	mo clean --dry-run, mo clean
Overview	Mac health score, this Mac at a glance, quick actions, rotating tips	mo status --json, mo history --json
Tools	Project build output, app uninstaller, optimize, installer files, Intel code in universal apps	mo purge, mo uninstall, mo optimize, mo installer, mo slim
Disk	Folder sizes, biggest first, click to go inside; right-click to show in Finder	mo analyze --json
Status	Live CPU, memory, disk, battery, cores and top processes	mo status --watch
History	Past runs, freed space, errors	mo history --json

More:

• English and Ukrainian, switchable in the sidebar.
• Nothing runs on its own. Every scan starts with your click.
• Interactive steps stay interactive. Uninstall, slim and installer cleanup ask for Mole's own confirmation in a terminal built into the window.
• Mole updates. The sidebar shows whether a newer Mole is out and can run mo update.

Requirements

• macOS 14 Sonoma or later
• Mole, installed with Homebrew (see below)

Install

Download

1. Install Mole. It comes through Homebrew, the package manager for macOS. If you don't have Homebrew yet, paste this into Terminal (the command from brew.sh):

   /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

   Then install Mole:

   brew install mole

   Other ways to install Mole are in its README.

2. Download Molekit-<version>.dmg from Releases, open it and drag Molekit to Applications.

3. Molekit is signed ad-hoc but not notarized by Apple (that needs a paid Apple Developer account), so macOS blocks the first launch. Remove the quarantine flag once:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Molekit.app

The app is universal (Apple silicon and Intel). Each release lists the SHA-256 of its DMG.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/TrueNihilisme/Molekit.git
cd Molekit
./build.sh --install    # builds Molekit.app and copies it to /Applications

Needs Xcode or the Xcode command line tools (Swift 6). ./build.sh without --install leaves the app in build/. An app you build yourself is not quarantined, so it opens straight away.

Full Disk Access

macOS hides some folders (other apps' containers, Mail, Safari data and more) from apps without Full Disk Access. Mole runs inside Molekit, so without it Mole may find less than it could. For the full picture: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access → add Molekit, then restart Molekit.

How unticking works

Mole cleans everything a run finds; it has no per-category switch. When you untick a category, Molekit adds its folders to Mole's own whitelist (~/.config/mole/whitelist) for that one run and then restores the file exactly as it was. A plain path in the whitelist protects the folder and everything inside it.

If the Mac loses power or Molekit is killed in the middle of such a run, the extra entries stay in the whitelist until Molekit starts again and restores it. If you run mo in Terminal before that, open ~/.config/mole/whitelist and delete the lines below # Molekit: unticked in the app, temporary (or the whole file, if it starts with # Mole defaults (written by Molekit…).

Privacy

• No analytics, no crash reporting, no accounts.
• The only network request Molekit makes itself is the Mole update check, to the same place mo uses: formulae.brew.sh for Homebrew installs, GitHub releases otherwise.
• Everything else is local: Molekit runs mo and reads what it prints.

Building and testing

swift build                       # debug build
swift test                        # parser and whitelist tests
MOLEKIT_LIVE=1 swift test         # also read-only / --dry-run tests against your real mo
swift Scripts/make-icon.swift     # regenerate the app icon

Screenshots in this README are made with demo data: Molekit --demo-shots <folder>.

Credits

• Mole by tw93 (GPL-3.0) does all the real work.
• SwiftTerm by Miguel de Icaza (MIT) powers the built-in terminal.
• Inter by Rasmus Andersson (SIL OFL 1.1) is the interface font.

Support

If this project is useful to you, you can support its development with a crypto donation:

Network	Address
Bitcoin (BTC)	bc1q0sw0w9mqtghrxfyyqw834sjs7t7rr7futulgv4
Ethereum (ETH)	0xAb3a04a4b52547a7f8B00abb0088D3d9d11CA461
Solana (SOL)	2QBoKrUaiAcAKxNJ7o9oe9Q16ptjLQohR8KyPX2tpJhZ

Send each coin only on the network named in its row: a transfer made on another network cannot be recovered.

License

GPL-3.0. The bundled Inter font is under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (Sources/Molekit/Resources/Fonts/Inter-LICENSE.txt).