THEBIN: ALTERNATIVE MACOS TRASH MANAGER MAKES PURGING FILES MORE FUN

After first being introduced as the “Wastebasket” in 1982 with the Lisa, Apple forever cemented the concept in the hearts of personal computer users by porting it onto the Macintosh two years later. Renamed as simply Trash, this unassuming file directory has helped users with file deletion for nearly four decades.

But for such an important feature, relatively little has changed over the years—most notably, a Finder preference introduced with macos Sierra gives the option of automatically deleting Trash after 30 days. Should that not go quite far enough, there’s now a third-party app to answer the call.

Semibits’s thebin ( go.macworld.com/ tbin) can be configured to automatically take over managing your Trash. Instead of temporarily moving files to the invisible .Trashes folder in macos, thebin intervenes, migrating unwanted content to its own storage space where the app can handle such files more efficiently.

After installing the app with default auto-migration settings enabled, files dragged and dropped into Trash will be seamlessly moved to thebin without further user intervention. Personally, I can’t stand that overstuffed Trash icon in the Dock, begging to be emptied all the time, and I suspect many of you feel the same way. This feature alone will be enough to entice many users to download the app, which has a free seven-day trial.

Opening thebin displays a small window with a visually pleasing look at how many items are waiting to be discarded, and how much space they’re taking up on your Mac. At first launch, a tutorial walks users through setting everything up, and nice user interface touches abound, including fun animation as files are added or removed.

Click the red Empty button to purge files immediately; you’ll first be prompted to confirm this action, although the default behavior can be changed by unticking the Ask Before Emptying option in settings. Otherwise, click the Details button in the lower right corner to call up a summary of what’s been spared prior to kicking those files off your system for good.

There are rarely problems when trashing files, but thebin does a better job of resolving issues than macos alone.

By default, Trash files are automatically migrated to thebin, where they can be compressed and managed more efficiently.