How to remove StuffIt completely from your Mac
For some reason StuffIt ended up getting installed on my wife’s iMac. All very well, but I started finding its presence, and its association with every zip file on the Mac, somewhat annoying and unnecessary (what with unzipping now being built into Mac OS). So I tried to uninstall it. Easier said than done! There’s no uninstaller, and what’s more, it insinuates itself into every nook and cranny of Mac OS, and is a pig to remove manually.
I was pretty chuffed, then, to discover this Automator script on StuffIt’s maker’s website. Download NukeStuffitMac, unzip, run, and wait (it takes a while), and every trace of StuffIt is removed from your Mac. Nice! (I found I needed to restart the Mac afterwards to finish the job completely.)
April 20th, 2008 at 6:30 am
check out AppZapper. It is the tits!
April 20th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
If what bothered you was the fact that OS X was associating zip files to StuffIt, all you had to do was change this association. To do that, simply select a zip file, Get Info on it, select the application you DO want to use to open zip files, save, and done.
There are still many files that OS X can’t open by default, but StuffIt can, such as .rar.
April 20th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
@Gideon: AppZapper does look pretty cool!
@Weili: Already tried that, but couldn’t work out how to associate zip files with the default unarchiver utility. Where’s its executable?
April 21st, 2008 at 3:14 am
The advice from Weili is correct, he described the right way to associate a file type with an app.
The MacOS X executable for .zip files is called “Archive Utility.app” in 10.5, and IIRC it was called BOMArchiveHelper in 10.4. Either of these apps should appear automatically as a choice when you Get Info and change the “Open With” popup.
April 21st, 2008 at 7:26 am
@Charles: That’s the problem – BOMArchiveHelper wasn’t in my “Open With” list, and when I clicked “Other” to open the file browser, I couldn’t find BOMArchiveHelper in the Applications folder. I’m sure it’s lurking around somewhere, but I confess I didn’t spend time hunting around for it!
April 21st, 2008 at 7:56 am
Check:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_Utility
It is in “/System/Library/CoreServices/Archive Utility.app”
April 21st, 2008 at 7:59 am
Great stuff! Thanks Bill. 🙂
June 11th, 2009 at 7:38 am
I found that Stuffit would pop up and tell me that it didn’t recognize many different file types, such as *.mp4. Annoying as hell.