Peel 1.3.0

I dedicated a whole week to reading Peel again, page by page, and to the people who wrote in. This release is what came out of it: a helper that is harder to trick, the things you asked for, and 248 smaller findings, each fixed.

Peel needs macOS Tahoe 26 or later.

Peel is now an official Homebrew cask: brew install --cask peel.

Safer by one more check

Someone sent me a private mail about the helper, the part of Peel that moves what only root can, and they were right: a rename takes whatever holds a name at that instant, so between the moment the helper looks at an item and the moment it moves it, something else could be slipped into its place. Thank you for the report. Every item the helper moves now passes through a folder only it can reach, where it is checked again before it goes on. Please update. The details are in the security advisory GHSA-5m57-4fv5-9rrh.

From Issues and Discussions

• Background items (#4): Start, Stop, and Restart by what launchd really says, and Edit… for your own agents, with the old file kept in the Trash so History can bring it back.
• Standard accounts (#9): the helper works for an account that is not an administrator, once an administrator approves the action in the window macOS shows.
• Out of the Dock (#5): with Show in Menu Bar on, Peel can leave the Dock while no window is open and keep watching from the menu bar.
• Sync folders (#3): a folder a sync app keeps in step is named with that app, and a marker left behind by an app you removed no longer holds a folder back.
• Jobs of apps that are gone (#10): a job a deleted app left loaded can be stopped and removed from Background Items.

Elsewhere in Peel

An app listed in the Homebrew catalog is compared with the version Homebrew knows, after its own feed and without asking any server. Intel Software finds MacPorts commands, tools in your bin folders, Java runtimes, and apps set to open using Rosetta. Space shows virtual machines, Windows bottles, TeX Live, and .NET SDKs, each with the app that owns it. And Peel knows many more places where an app keeps something you could not get back, from browser profiles to saved games: shown, and never selected for you.

Tested on a Mac running macOS 26.7.1 and in a virtual machine running macOS 27.2, where real apps were uninstalled and what they left behind was followed by hand.

Thank you to @schultz911 and @freebrowser1 for their reports, and to @dc0dr and @Bammede for the ideas in Discussions.

Everything that changed in 1.3.0

Checksums

File	SHA-256
Peel-1.3.0.dmg	a70f84a9398432883dc3e9164f069817e04eccee32f9954b4a77ad7d2b04cb31
Peel-1.3.0.zip	547e6fb138f63cb02732f21e86f3a211bac14150bc9646e59337df4eb57a0a4d

Found a problem? Open an issue, or report a security problem privately, as SECURITY.md describes.