Common ways I clean up Mac disk space

Step 1: Identify large files and folders

Don’t waste your time deleting random 50MB folders, try to find the worst disk space offenders first.

du gives you the disk usage of files and folders, and sort -h sorts them in order of how completely out of line they are.

du -sh ./* | sort -h

Example output:

$ cd ~/Library/Caches

$ du -sh ./* | sort -h

# ...
219M	./typescript
271M	./Firefox
590M	./ms-playwright
650M	./CocoaPods
908M	./Google
1.7G	./ccache
2.0G	./Homebrew
5.6G	./Yarn

Yarn

After doing professional JS/TS development for a while this folder can quickly become many gigabytes:

~/Library/Caches/Yarn

iOS Simulator

I found recently that ~/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices was taking up 78GB of space on my device thanks to a bunch of old iOS device simulators. You can tidy this up with:

xcrun simctl delete unavailable

Source

Old iOS versions in Xcode

You can also delete old iOS versions you no longer need by going to Xcode > Settings > Components