CleanMyMac, iStat Menus, a duplicate finder and a clipboard manager add up to real money every year. Helm does all of it in one window, free and open source.
My Mac had a folder of utilities. A system monitor in the menu bar. A separate
disk cleaner. A duplicate finder I bought once and used twice a year. A
clipboard manager. An uninstaller, because dragging an app to the Trash leaves
its support files behind forever.
Between them: several subscriptions, a couple of one-off licences that stopped
working after an OS upgrade, five menu-bar icons, and five different ideas about
what a button should look like.
So I built Helm, which is all of it in one window. It is free,
MIT licensed, and the source is public.
Monitor — Memory, CPU, GPU, Sensors, Battery and Network, each with its own
page and 24 hours of history as a chart. That last part is the one I wanted
most. Every activity monitor shows you now; almost none of them show you what
happened at 3pm while you were in a meeting and the fans were screaming.
CPU comes with a full process manager. Sensors reads real SMC temperatures.
Battery includes the levels of connected AirPods and Magic Keyboards, which
macOS will show you only if you go looking.
Storage is the deepest part. A disk overview with exact capacity including
purgeable space — the number that explains why Finder and Disk Utility
disagree about your free space. A treemap explorer, a junk cleaner, large and old
files, and a duplicate finder.
Utilities — clipboard history with a global quick-paste popup that handles
text, images and file copies. A colour picker, keep-awake, quick actions.
Plus a configurable menu-bar readout, custom alerts per metric ("tell me when
RAM goes over 90%"), and a login-item watchdog that tells you the moment an app
installs itself at startup — which, if you have ever wondered why boot got slow,
is the feature you actually needed.
One feature deserves its own section because it explains a question almost every
Mac user has asked at some point: **why do Finder, Disk Utility and About This
Mac all disagree about my free space?**
The answer is purgeable space. macOS counts storage that it could reclaim if it
needed to — local Time Machine snapshots, cached iCloud files it can re-download,
Xcode derived data it considers disposable — as available, because from the
system's point of view it is. Finder shows you one interpretation, Disk Utility
another.
So you delete a 4 GB file and free space goes up by 400 MB, or by nothing, and it
feels like the machine is lying to you. It is not; it is reporting a number whose
definition you were never told.
Helm shows capacity, used, purgeable and free as separate figures, so the
disagreement stops being mysterious. When free space is not moving, you can see
that purgeable is absorbing it.
The category breakdown then answers the next question — *what is actually using
this?* On my machine it is System Data at 232 GB, Applications at 20.9 GB, and
Developer at 19.3 GB, which is Xcode's caches and simulators. That last one is
the single biggest reclaimable chunk on most developer Macs and almost nobody
knows it is there.
The feature I did not expect to use most.
Applications can install themselves as login items without a dialog. Over a
couple of years a Mac accumulates a dozen of them — updaters, sync agents, helper
tools from apps you deleted — and boot gets slower in a way that is impossible to
attribute to anything.
Helm watches the login-item list and tells you the moment something adds itself.
Not a weekly report you ignore: a notification at the moment it happens, while
you still remember which app you just installed.
Two honest reasons.
The first is that this class of app has a trust problem. A utility that wants
Full Disk Access, watches your clipboard, and offers to delete files for you is
asking for a lot. "Trust me, I'm a $50 app" is not an argument. **The source is
public**, so you can read exactly what it does before you run it — which is a
better answer than any privacy policy.
The second is that I wrote it for myself and I use it every day. Charging for it
would mean supporting a product; publishing it means someone else gets the thing
I already built.
There is no account, no telemetry, and no network calls. Nothing leaves your Mac.
Worth being straight about, because "Mac cleaner" is a category with a bad
reputation, largely earned.
It does not promise to make your Mac faster. Most of what that phrase means
in this category is either placebo or actively harmful. Helm shows you what is
using memory, CPU and disk, and lets you act on it. It does not "optimise" RAM,
because macOS's memory management does not need help and free RAM is wasted RAM.
It does not clean your registry, because macOS does not have one, and any
Mac app claiming to is telling you something about itself.
It does not phone home. No account, no telemetry, no analytics, no network
calls at all. That is checkable, because the source is public — which is a
stronger claim than a privacy policy, since a privacy policy is a promise and
source code is evidence.
It does not delete anything without asking. Every cleaning action shows you
what it found and waits.
Helm is not notarised, because Apple only notarises apps from developers paying
$99 a year, and this is free.
So the first time you open it, macOS will say it cannot check it for malicious
software. That warning means Apple has not personally inspected this build. It
does not mean anything is wrong with it — but it looks alarming if nobody warns
you, and I would rather warn you here than have you assume the download is
broken.
If that trade is not one you want to make, the source is on GitHub and you can
build it yourself.
Download Helm — free, macOS 10.15 or later, Apple Silicon and
Intel, about 20 MB.
Grant Full Disk Access when it asks, or the Storage tool can only measure the
parts of the disk macOS lets any app see, which is not the interesting parts.
That is a fair thing to hesitate over, and I would rather address it than hope
you do not notice.
Full Disk Access is what lets the Storage tool measure everything rather than
just your Documents folder. Without it the disk breakdown is wrong in a way that
is worse than useless, because it looks complete.
The reason to be comfortable granting it here is the same reason the app is open
source: you can read what it does with it. The storage code walks the
filesystem, sums sizes, and writes nothing. If you would rather verify than take
my word, the repository is the answer — and if you would rather not grant it at
all, everything except the full disk breakdown still works.
That is the trade, stated plainly. I would not grant Full Disk Access to a
closed-source utility either.