Bugler

Know what your Mac is doing. Clean it up without guessing. Bugler reads your machine directly — no background daemon, no account, no telemetry — and shows you every file before it removes anything. It asks for no administrator password. macOS 14 or later · Apple Silicon and Intel · about 21 MB

Overview — System brief

• The one screen that answers is my Mac all right?
• Live CPU, memory, disk and network readings sit beside a Needs attention panel that names actual problems and the action for each — not a score, not a grade. Below them: the processes using the most of your machine right now, your connected Bluetooth accessories with their battery levels, and five shortcut tiles you can remap to whichever tools you actually use.
• When nothing is wrong it says so quietly, once. A maintenance app that invents problems to justify itself is worse than no maintenance app.

Cleanup — Find and remove reclaimable files

• Caches, logs, browser data, Xcode derived data, the Trash, and the leftovers that stay behind after apps are dragged away.
• Every candidate is listed with its size and its exact path, grouped so you can take a whole category or pick through it. Nothing is removed without being shown first, and what Bugler decided to leave alone is listed too, with the reason — a file another user owns, a path that is protected, a target that changed since you looked at it.
• Removals go to the Trash by default, so a wrong call stays recoverable. After a run the page measures again by itself, because the review you were looking at now describes a Mac that no longer exists.

Performance — Machine vitals

• Eight views of what the machine is actually doing: Summary, CPU per core and per cluster, Memory with the pressure reading and the apps holding it, GPU, Disk, Network per interface in both directions, Energy, and Thermals.
• Readings come from macOS itself — IOKit, sysctl, Mach — sampled once and shared by every page and the menu bar, so two surfaces can never disagree about the same number. A sensor this Mac does not publish shows a dash, never a zero.

Apps — App management

• Every application on the Mac, with its version, size, and when you last opened it. Four tabs:
• Uninstall — finds an app's leftovers by exact bundle identity, never by guessing at names, and shows you each file before removing anything.
• Updates — checks each app's own update feed and Homebrew's public cask catalogue, and marks the apps that update themselves so you leave them alone.
• Homebrew — your casks and formulae, with what is outdated, handled on brew's terms rather than behind its back.
• Startup — what launches when you log in, and what to do about

Optimize — Optimization workspace

• Where the disk actually went, in three readings of the same volume: a sunburst map of the folder tree you can click into, the same bytes grouped by what kind of thing they are, and the individual files big enough to be worth a decision.

Services — Service control

• Running processes, Docker containers, open ports, and launchd jobs — four sources, one status-first inspector, with search and filters on each. The tab that answers what is listening on 3000? without four separate tools.

Utilities — Everyday productivity tools

• Seven small tools that act on your files rather than on the system: Downloads Tidy, Duplicate Finder, Clipboard history, Screenshot, Drop Tray, Restore Center — which lists what Bugler removed and puts it back — and a Misc page holding the colour picker.

Tools — Hardware and system toolbox

• Eight instruments that act on the machine:
• Drive Health — wear, lifetime remaining, error counts and temperature, read natively from the drive's own NVMe health log. No third-party tool, no helper to install.
• Benchmark — CPU, memory, GPU and storage, scored against measured baselines and exportable as JSON.
• Battery — health, cycles, charge history, and an optional charge ceiling.
• Fan Control, Audio (per-app volume and mic mute), Permissions (which apps hold which macOS grants), Screen Time (opt-in, local, off by default), and Maintenance — a small set of bounded, reversible chores.

Diagnostics — Diagnostics and operation history

• Every operation Bugler has performed: what it did, what it reclaimed, what it refused and why. Beside it, what this Mac's capabilities actually are, Bugler's own crash reports, and seven readiness checks — FileVault, Gatekeeper, Spotlight, Time Machine, software update, device management, disk space.
• A maintenance app that cannot tell you what it did to your machine is asking for trust it has not earned.

Menu bar

• The readings you care about, one click from anywhere, in Compact or Detailed density. Global keyboard shortcuts for Clipboard, Screenshot, Drop Tray, Colour Picker, Awake, Break, and Mic Mute — all seven remappable.