Maccy: how to uninstall it cleanly

Dragging the bundle to the trash is not the whole job. The clipboard manager in question runs inside the macOS sandbox, which means its settings and its copy history live in a container folder under the user library rather than inside the app itself. Deleting /Applications/Maccy.app removes the program. It leaves the history exactly where it was.

That distinction matters more than disk space. The container holds the text that passed through the clipboard while the app was running. On a work machine that can include client addresses, internal reference numbers, one time codes that were pasted once, and API tokens copied out of a dashboard. Removing the app stops new entries from being recorded. It does nothing about the ones already saved.

What the removal actually touches

The Homebrew cask definition is the clearest published list of what belongs to this app. As of 10 September 2026 the cask ships version 2.7.1, names the bundle identifier org.p0deje.Maccy, and declares macOS Sonoma as the minimum requirement. Its removal stanza quits that identifier, clears a login item called Maccy, and trashes three paths:

• ~/Library/Application Scripts/org.p0deje.Maccy
• ~/Library/Containers/org.p0deje.Maccy
• ~/Library/Preferences/org.p0deje.Maccy.plist

Three paths and one login item. That is the full footprint on a normal installation. There is no daemon in /Library/LaunchDaemons, no kernel extension, and no privileged helper, which is a direct consequence of the app being sandboxed and distributed through the App Store as well as directly.

The install route changes the first step, though. There are two ways this app reaches a Mac. One is the App Store listing, priced at 1,500 yen in the Japanese store and 9.99 US dollars in the American one. The other is a free download, either from the release page on GitHub or through Homebrew. Removing an App Store copy from Launchpad is fine. Removing a Homebrew copy the same way leaves the cask registered, so the next brew upgrade will report a version that is no longer present. Running brew list --cask before starting settles which case applies.

Step one: quit the app and clear the login item

Click the menu bar icon and choose the quit item. The cask does the same thing programmatically by quitting org.p0deje.Maccy, and the reason is practical rather than tidy. A running process that loses its bundle keeps its menu bar icon drawn until the process ends, so an app deleted while running appears not to have been deleted at all.

If the menu bar icon was turned off in settings, there is no menu to quit from. Activity Monitor is the fallback: find the process by name, select it, and stop it. A restart works too, provided the login item has already been cleared, which is the next step anyway.

Then open System Settings, General, Login Items and Extensions, and remove the entry. On macOS Ventura and later this list mixes items an app registered for itself with items added by hand, and deleting the bundle does not clear the registration. What follows is a notification at each login saying the item could not be opened. Harmless, but it sends people hunting for a cause that was created by skipping one step.

One more thing happens at this point, and it is worth being deliberate about. Clipboard monitoring stops when the process stops. Until then, anything copied is still being recorded, including anything copied during the uninstall itself. Doing the quit first, rather than last, keeps the final entries in the history from being the ones added while cleaning up.

Step two: remove the bundle

For an App Store installation, press and hold the icon in Launchpad and delete it, or drag Maccy.app out of the Applications folder in Finder. Both leave the container folder untouched, which is expected behaviour and not a failure.

For a Homebrew installation, use the command instead:

brew uninstall --cask maccy
brew uninstall --zap --cask maccy

The first form removes the bundle and deregisters the cask. The second adds the zap stanza, which clears the login item and trashes all three paths in one pass, history included. Anyone who wants to read the container before it goes should run the first form, inspect, and then handle the rest by hand or run the zap variant afterwards.

Reinstallation plans are worth settling here as well, because the download source is not neutral. The vendor site opens with a warning about impostor sites:

Beware of fake websites impersonating Maccy. maccy.app is the only official website.

That leaves three sources that can be verified: the official site, the App Store listing, and the project repository whose release page is what the Homebrew cask points at. A build collected from a search result that looked close enough is not in that set.

Step three: the three leftover paths

Path	Contents	Handling
~/Library/Containers/org.p0deje.Maccy	The copy history and the app settings	Read or decide not to, then delete
~/Library/Application Scripts/org.p0deje.Maccy	Scratch area macOS creates for sandboxed apps	Delete
~/Library/Preferences/org.p0deje.Maccy.plist	Shortcut keys and other preferences	Delete

The library folder is hidden by default, so Finder's sidebar will not get there. Use Go, Go to Folder, and paste the path.

Only the first row calls for a decision. The other two are working files the operating system or the app generated, and nothing is lost by removing them. The container is different because it is the store, not a cache. Two reasonable choices exist: open it and check what is inside before it goes, or accept that it will not be read and delete it outright. The option that causes trouble is the third one, which is deleting the bundle, never getting to the container, and leaving the history on disk indefinitely under a folder name nobody recognises a year later.

Time Machine changes the arithmetic slightly. Earlier snapshots contain their own copies of that container, and clearing the live path does not reach them. For a history that contained a credential, revoking the credential at the service that issued it is the step that actually closes the exposure. Deleting files closes the local copy only.

Confirming the removal

Order matters in one specific way. Deleting the container while the app is still running invites the app to write its settings back on exit, which recreates the folder. Quit, then bundle, then leftovers, and that does not happen.

Three commands confirm the end state:

ls -d ~/Library/Containers/org.p0deje.Maccy 2>/dev/null
ls -d ~/Library/Application\ Scripts/org.p0deje.Maccy 2>/dev/null
ls ~/Library/Preferences/org.p0deje.Maccy.plist 2>/dev/null

Silence from all three means the job is done. Any output names a path still present. Note that moving something to the trash is not deletion, so the trash needs emptying before these commands go quiet.

Preferences are the one place where a stale reading is possible. macOS keeps preference values in memory, and a plist deleted from under a running system can reappear. Checking again after a restart resolves the ambiguity.

The login item deserves the same second look. Reopen System Settings, General, Login Items and Extensions, and confirm the entry is gone rather than assuming the earlier removal held. On a Mac with more than one user account, none of this carries across: the bundle in Applications is shared, but the container, the scripts folder and the preferences file exist separately per account. Cleaning up in one account leaves the other exactly as it was, history included, which is easy to miss on a shared machine.

Choosing what goes in its place

Three questions narrow a replacement list faster than any feature grid: which macOS versions are supported, how it is paid for, and where the data is kept.

Support first. This app requires macOS Sonoma 14 or higher according to both the vendor site and the App Store listing. That is a comparatively recent floor, and tools in the same category do not agree on it, so the version installed on the machine decides which candidates are even eligible.

Payment next. The source code here is published under the MIT license and a free download exists. The App Store description states plainly that the paid build is sold to support development, not to unlock anything, which is why both routes deliver the same 2.7.1. A replacement billed on a schedule raises a different question: what happens to the stored data when billing stops.

Data location matters most for anything that touches the clipboard. A tool that keeps everything on the machine is removed by deleting files. A tool that syncs has a copy on a server, and uninstalling the client does not delete it. Reading the privacy page before the feature page saves the trouble of discovering this after the fact. Size is a rough proxy for scope: the App Store listing puts this app at roughly 2.4 MB, while tools that also manage images and sync across devices run to tens of megabytes.

How much menu bar space this frees

One slot. This app occupies a single menu bar item, so removing it recovers exactly one. Anyone who started the uninstall because the menu bar had become unreadable should expect the relief to be marginal, because the crowding was never caused by one app. The usual lineup is cloud storage, a password manager, a backup agent, a meeting client, an input switcher and a network indicator, each holding its own slot and none of them optional.

There is a smaller consequence that catches people out. Removing any menu bar item shifts every icon to its left across by one slot, so the positions people had memorised no longer hold. For a day or two afterwards the row feels unfamiliar even though only one thing changed. That effect is worth absorbing once, as part of a deliberate pass over the whole row, rather than repeatedly through a series of one at a time removals spread over weeks.

A sort by click frequency is the productive next step. Most lists fall into three groups: items clicked several times a day, items glanced at for status and clicked occasionally, and items never clicked at all. The third group is typically the largest, and every member of it could be hidden with no loss. Laptops with a notch reach the practical limit earlier than the count suggests, since items that overflow past the notch simply stop being drawn.

For the items that cannot be removed, such as a backup agent that must keep running or software a workplace requires, hiding is the remaining option. The test that decides whether hiding sticks is whether a hidden icon can still be clicked and its menu opened without expanding the row first. If retrieving an icon costs extra steps every time, the original layout comes back within a week.

What to change first

Quit the app, clear the login item, delete the bundle, and open the container before it reaches the trash. Once the three paths are gone, sort the remaining menu bar items by how often each one is clicked and hide the never clicked group, which is the job Koffret exists to do. For the supported macOS range and the current build, see download, and for a side by side view of how these tools differ while collapsed, how it compares.