Greg Ferro - Work to Live

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OSX: Monolingual, Saving Space on OSX Lion

I’ve been using Monolingual for a long time to save space on my machine but I haven’t tried to use it on OSX Lion since I’ve always had plenty of space. Now that I’m moving to a 512GB SSD ( I’m going to be short on space with my Retina MBP) I need to be more aggressive about managing the free space on my laptop. This tip is about using Monolingual to remove languages in your applications - most applications support many languages, which you probably don’t use. Deleting the unused languages won’t impact the software but will save some disk space.

Warning: You can seriously break your software. If you are not able to restore your machine from a backup then don't do this. Accidents do happen and you should be prepared before you do this. Note that some applications get upset when the language files are removed. Can't help you there.
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In my current setup I was able to save 3.5 Gigabytes of space.

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I also remove the keyboard layouts. Note do NOT select the Apple Keyboard Layouts or bad things may happen.

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I do not recommend removing Architectures. I had a lot of Apps detect this as corruption or malware so I don’t bother with this anymore. Monolingual 20120622 4

Note that you will need to run Monolingual on a regular basis. Everytime an update to an application happens, the language files will be replaced.

Again, do not do this if you do not have and know how to restore your computer from a backup.