Dclutter

The story

Every semester ends the same way for me.

Finals are done, projects are submitted, and my Downloads folder is a mess. Lecture PDFs, three versions of the same dataset, a zip I already extracted, screenshots I don't remember taking. During the sem there's no time to clean, so everything just piles up.

When I finally sit down to declutter, it gets worse before it gets better. A folder here, a folder there. I'd open Finder, stare at hundreds of files sorted alphabetically, and give up somewhere around the B's.

So I got curious and measured it. My Downloads folder had 771 items. All the duplicates combined came to 27 MB, about half a percent of the folder.

That changed how I saw the problem. Storage wasn't the issue. I had 771 decisions I'd been putting off.

So I built DClutter.

It's a macOS app that shows you one file at a time. You get a real preview and the details that matter: how big the file is, when you last opened it, and whether it's a copy of something else. Then it asks you one thing: keep it, trash it, or file it. Swipe right, swipe left, or press a key, and the next file comes up.

A few things I cared about while building it:

Files are ranked, not listed A to Z, so the big, stale, never-opened stuff shows up first. Nothing is deleted when you swipe. Trashed files are staged until you review the list and confirm, and even then they go to the Trash, not straight into oblivion. Every move can be undone, and if you quit halfway, you pick up exactly where you left off. Progress is counted in files decided, not gigabytes freed, because the decisions were the real problem all along.

It started as a tool just for me, for that one chaotic week at the end of every semester. Now 18+ other people use it, which I didn't expect from an app whose whole job is to make itself unnecessary for a few months.

It's free and open source. If your Downloads folder looks like mine did, give it a swipe.

🔗 github.com/RokiTheWise/DClutter