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I currently have Wolfram One and have in the past had Mathematica installed on my machine and need to remove all extensions, plugins, and add-ons that are associated with either product. In particular anything responsive for messing with Spotlight.

How do I do this on macOS?

orome
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1 Answers1

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Deleting the app bundle (Mathematica.app) is sufficient to remove all components of Mathematica itself, including the Spotlight indexer and the QuickLook plugin. You can check that both of these are located in Mathematica.app/Contents/Library.

To remove WolframScript, which is installed separately from Mathematica, remove WolframScript.app as well as /usr/local/bin/wolframscript (which is just a symlink to an executable to within WolframScript.app). Note that WolframScript does not come with any Spotlight indexers.

To remove not only software components, but also settings and caches, as well as Mathematica packages, look at this support article. Doing this is not necessary if all you want is to remove the Spotlight indexer. To make the answer complete, the locations to remove are ~/Library/Mathematica/, ~/Library/Wolfram/ and ~/Library/Caches/Wolfram/. These may be different for Wolfram One, which I am not familiar with.

Szabolcs
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  • What about ~/Library/Mathematica? (There’s stuff in mine, but I don’t know if it would need to be removed or not.) – Michael E2 Jul 08 '21 at 13:08
  • @MichaelE2 That location is covered in the support article I linked to. It does not contains stand-alone software such as Spotlight indexers, only Mathematica settings and Mathematica packages / updates. It is necessary to remove it to reset Mathematica to a pristine state, but it is not necessary to remove to make sure that nothing is left on the system that can affect the functioning of the operating system (a bad Spotlight indexer can wreak havoc). – Szabolcs Jul 08 '21 at 13:22
  • I guess I was reacting to the OP saying they wanted to remove the packages they had installed. – Michael E2 Jul 08 '21 at 13:36
  • @MichaelE2 I interpreted "add-on" differently, but you're right, it might have meant packages. I'll amend the answer. – Szabolcs Jul 08 '21 at 14:35