Broom lives in your menu bar and finds the giant files, forgotten downloads and caches quietly eating your disk. It never deletes anything — it only ever moves things to the Trash.
One 3 GB download here. A folder of old versions there. Caches nobody asked for. None of it feels big on the day — and then one morning your Mac says it is out of space.
A fairly ordinary Mac, one year in.
Broom scans, then shows you exactly what it found and what each thing weighs. Nothing happens until you say so — and even then it only moves things to the Trash, where you can pull them straight back out.
↓ a play-along demo, with made-up numbers. A web page cannot read your disk —
only the app on your Mac can do that.
No window to manage, no dock icon, nothing running in the background eating your battery. Just a small carved broom in your menu bar that does nothing at all until you click it.
The whole app is smaller than one photo. Written in Swift, no frameworks bolted on.
It does absolutely nothing until you click it. No daemon, no timer, no battery drain.
There is no networking code in Broom at all. Nothing it reads ever leaves your Mac.
Real sizes, real memory pressure. No invented "boost" figures to make you feel good.
Walks your whole home folder for anything over 250 MB, wherever it is hiding. Usually the biggest win by far.
Big files you downloaded once and never opened again. Installers, zips, disk images.
Temporary files apps leave behind. They rebuild them automatically, so clearing them is safe.
The same file downloaded twice. Matched by size first, then by actually reading the contents.
node_modules, build folders, virtual environments. All rebuildable from your code.
The invisible .DS_Store files macOS scatters into every folder you have ever opened.
Plenty of cleaner apps show you a big number and promise to free your memory. Here is the thing: empty RAM is wasted RAM. macOS deliberately fills spare memory with cache to make everything faster. Emptying it makes your Mac slower, not quicker.
So Broom shows memory pressure instead — the number that actually tells you if your Mac is struggling.
People imagine their disk fills up from thousands of little things. It is nearly never that. It is a handful of enormous files you forgot about. A scan usually looks something like this:
Four files. Over 4 GB. Found in about a second.
A cleaner that deletes the wrong thing is worse than no cleaner at all. So Broom is built to be impossible to regret.
Everything goes to the Trash. If Broom gets something wrong, you drag it straight back. Nothing is ever gone.
Scanning only ever reads. You untick anything you want to keep, and the button tells you the exact size before you press it.
Documents, Desktop, your code, your keys — Broom is forbidden from touching them, whatever a scan turns up.
It sits in your menu bar. One click drops down a small panel — no window, no dock icon, no fuss.
It reads your disk for a second or two. Nothing is changed, nothing is sent anywhere. It all happens on your Mac.
Everything it found, with sizes, biggest first. Untick anything you want to keep — this is the important bit.
The rest goes to the Trash. Check the Trash before you empty it, and you are done.
Broom cannot delete anything — it only moves things to the Trash, and it refuses to touch Documents, Desktop, your code folders or your keys. If it ever gets something wrong, you drag it back out of the Trash.
No. There is no internet connection in Broom at all. Everything it reads stays on your Mac.
Because that is not a real thing. macOS fills spare RAM with cache on purpose to make your Mac faster, and "freeing" it just makes everything slower for a while. Any app selling you that number is selling you a number.
It depends entirely on what you have been hoarding. On a Mac that has never been cleared, several gigabytes is normal — and the giant-files scan nearly always turns up something you had completely forgotten about.
Peter, 11, in Berlin. It is written in Swift, weighs under 200 KB, and sits quietly in the menu bar doing nothing until you ask it to look.
Free, tiny, and it never deletes a thing. For any Mac running macOS 12 or newer.
Mac: 1.5 MB · macOS 12+ · Apple Silicon & Intel
Linux: one Python file, no install needed
Unsigned, because a developer certificate costs €99 a year. First run: right-click the app → Open.