Pants in Motion » Mac Trick of the Month

Nov 02 2007

Mac Trick of the Month

Published by Paul at 12:30 pm under Macs

Open your Applications folder, select a program and press Cmd-I to get info on it. Expand the Languages drop-down, and select all the languages except English. Hit the minus button to delete them. Empty the trash.

Watch hard drive space come back.

6 Responses to “Mac Trick of the Month”

# gizoon 02 Nov 2007 at 2:12 pm

Do that for each app, one by one? How much space are we talking here? kilobytes? megabytes? gigabytes?
# Paulon 02 Nov 2007 at 2:52 pm

Depending on the app and how many languages you installed with the machine (probably all of them for you), it can be substantial.

Example: TextEdit - before : 22.1Mb, after: 1.9Mb. The more help files, the bigger the saving.
# sheolon 05 Nov 2007 at 8:16 am

hrm weird, in Leopard I can’t hit the minus button. I had everything selected, unselected English and the minus button is greyed out.
# Paulon 05 Nov 2007 at 10:33 am

Did you do an upgrade or a fresh install? You might try an app called Monolingual that does the same thing automatically.
# sheolon 05 Nov 2007 at 12:55 pm

It was a fresh install done by our Mac expert here at RMIT. I’ll check out Monolingual soon if I get the time, planning work around two weekends of complete building power shutdown at the moment
# Paulon 05 Nov 2007 at 3:32 pm

Hrmm, the first thing that comes to mind is that you’re not an admin user perhaps? Check in the System Preferences/Accounts window.