Helm

Take the helm of your Mac — fifteen native tools in one window. Free to use, with no account required.

Helm is one app that replaces a folder full of them. Fifteen tools share a single window, a single menu-bar item and one design language — so the thing you need is always two clicks away instead of buried in whichever utility you installed for it last year.

It is free, MIT licensed, and built with Flutter. No account, no telemetry, no network calls: nothing ever leaves your Mac.

Monitor

Memory, CPU, GPU, Sensors, Battery and Network — each with its own page and 24 hours of history as a chart, so you can see what happened while you were away rather than only what is happening now.

CPU comes with a full process manager. Sensors reads real SMC temperatures. Battery includes the levels of connected AirPods and Magic Keyboards, which macOS itself will only show you if you go looking.

Manage

Storage is the deepest tool in the app:

• Disk overview with exact capacity including purgeable space, matching About This Mac rather than contradicting it
• Sizes measured as space on disk, not as file lengths — a compressed system binary is counted at what it occupies, a sparse file at what it costs, and the zero-byte Icon\r holding 60 KB of resource fork is counted at all. Totals agree with du
• Category breakdown into disjoint buckets — Applications, Documents, Photos, Music, Movies, Mail, Messages, Developer, Caches, Trash, and the opaque System Data everyone wonders about
• Visual explorer — a squarified treemap with breadcrumb drill-down, from the whole disk down to a single file
• System junk cleaner — caches, logs, saved app state, browser caches, old downloads, mail attachments, and developer junk (Xcode DerivedData, simulators, npm, yarn, gradle, pip, CocoaPods). Safe items are pre-selected; risky ones are opt-in
• Large & old files, a duplicate finder that matches byte-for-byte and always keeps one copy, and APFS snapshot thinning

Alongside it: an Uninstaller that removes leftovers, Startup management, and a Privacy tool.

Utilities

Clipboard history with a global ⌃⌘V quick-paste popup that handles text, images and file copies. Plus a Color Picker, Keep Awake, and Quick Actions.

Plus

A configurable live menu-bar item, custom alerts per metric ("tell me when RAM goes over 90%"), housekeeping watchers, and a login-item watchdog that warns the moment an app installs itself at startup.

Safe by design

Helm never deletes destructively. Everything it removes goes to the Trash, so you can always get it back. The only exception is emptying the Trash itself, which you confirm explicitly.

Every removal in the app passes one guard before it happens, and that guard refuses filesystem and container roots — /, /Users, your home folder and its top-level folders — along with OS internals and malformed paths. The uninstaller matches an app's leftovers on a segment boundary, so removing Chrome cannot offer you Chrome Canary's profile. The duplicate finder skips hard links, which are byte-identical but are one file on disk, so "deleting the copy" would have freed nothing and broken whatever made the link. A hundred and twenty-seven automated tests hold those rules in place.

Free, permanently

Every feature, no paid tier, no upgrade prompt, nothing held back for a Pro version. Most of what Helm replaces is paid and increasingly rented rather than bought. Helm is MIT licensed with the whole source on GitHub, which is the only form of that promise anybody should accept.

Design

A custom "deep dark + glass" design system: a frameless vibrancy window with the traffic lights overlaid on a translucent sidebar, native SF Pro typography, and charts and treemaps built by hand rather than pulled from a charting package.

Requires macOS 12 Monterey or later. Universal — Apple Silicon and Intel.