Launching today
Tidy
Your Mac tidies itself: screenshots, installers, Downloads
114 followers
Your Mac tidies itself: screenshots, installers, Downloads
114 followers
Tidy lives in your menu bar and handles three chores you keep doing by hand. It archives new Desktop screenshots, renaming them from their content with on-device OCR — "Screenshot 14.22.10.png" becomes "invoice-march.png". It ejects thedmg you mounted and trashes the installer. It sorts new Downloads by type, with rules you write in plain English. Apple Intelligence builds them on-device, so nothing leaves your Mac. Only touches new files. Never deletes. $9 once, no subscription.
honestly the plain english rules thing is what got me, i typed "put pdfs from clients into Work/Clients" and it just worked. apple intelligence on-device feels like the right call too
@ceydausoa This comment genuinely made my day — you're the first person to confirm the AI rules working out in the wild, on a Mac I've never seen, with a phrasing I never tested. That "it just worked" is Apple's on-device model doing the inference, plus a strict validator double-checking its output before the rule goes live.
And yes, on-device was non-negotiable: a tool that reads your file names has no business sending them anywhere.
If a phrasing ever misfires, tell me — I tune the prompt with real examples.
Love the plain English rules for Downloads, that's exactly the kind of thing I'd actually use. One thing I'd love is the ability to undo a sort run if a rule misfires, since sorting is the kind of action that feels safer when you can roll it back.
@egemenucaf Undo is already in there — every move lands in the Activity log and one click reverses it, and the undo stack even survives restarts. But your ask has a fair nuance: today it's per-file, so rolling back a whole sorting pass takes a few clicks. A true "undo this run" — one click to revert everything a pass just did — is a clean upgrade, and it joins the dry-run mode others requested today on the 1.1 list.
Between a preview before and a run-level undo after, a misfiring rule becomes a non-event. That's exactly where this is heading.
Love the plain English rules and the on-device approach. One idea: let me exclude folders from the auto-sort, since I keep a Downloads subfolder for client assets that I want untouched. A simple right-click "ignore this folder" option would save me from writing a rule for every exception.
@resuljfoq Good news — your client-assets folder is already untouchable, by design. Tidy only ever looks at loose files at the top level of Downloads: it never recurses into subfolders, and it never moves folders themselves. So everything inside your subfolder is invisible to the sorter — no rule or exception needed. (Someone earlier in the thread had the exact same worry about a WIP folder — clearly a thing many of us do!)
An explicit "ignore this folder" control is already on the 1.1 list though, and I like the right-click idea for it. If Tidy ever gains optional deeper sorting, that toggle ships first.
finally something that doesnt try to be a whole file manager. the ocr renaming actually got my messy desktop down to zero icons in a couple days.
@abdulsametykzn Zero icons — that's the dream state, thanks for sharing it! And the "doesn't try to be a whole file manager" part is very deliberate: Tidy does three chores and refuses to grow a dashboard. Scope is a feature. The moment a utility needs its own onboarding, it's become the mess it was supposed to clean.
The OCR rename for screenshots is genuinely useful, turned a messy pile into something I could actually search. The plain English rules for Downloads feel like the right idea too, though I wish I could preview where a file would land before it moves.
@salimwpnh "Something I could actually search" — that's the quiet superpower of the OCR names, glad you found it. Spotlight suddenly works on your screenshots.
And you're the third person today asking to see where a file will land before it moves — that officially makes dry-run/preview the most-requested feature of this launch, and it's locked in for 1.1. Current thinking: a pending list showing "file → destination" so tuning a rule takes seconds instead of trial and error. This thread is doing my product design for me and I'm not complaining.
The screenshot renaming with on-device OCR is genuinely useful, finally my Desktop isn't a graveyard of "Screenshot 14.22.10.png" files. Love that it only handles new files and never nukes anything, plus nine bucks once feels right for something this focused.
@ezgiirru "A graveyard of Screenshot 14.22.10.png files" — that's the most accurate description of my old Desktop I've ever read.
And thank you for saying the price feels right. $9-once only works because the app is this narrow: no servers, no per-user costs, nothing to subscribe you to. A focused tool gets to cost what a lunch costs — once.
I literally set aside time each week to do this myself so this is so cool!! Does it let you set custom rules beyond strict logic or is there a way to use the AI to set rules with more context that I can describe to it? Also would love to see a log of everything that's been changed every now and then so that I can clear my trash with confidence. Great stuff!
@neuroartist Thank you — you just described the target user perfectly (past me, every Sunday).
On the AI: you can describe rules with as much context as you like — "invoices and receipts as PDFs go to Finance" — and the on-device model turns that into a rule. The honest nuance: what it produces is still a strict, inspectable rule (extensions → folder), by design. The AI is the translator, not the judge — no fuzzy per-file decisions moving your files on vibes. Content-aware sorting is a tempting future direction, but only if it keeps the "you can see exactly why" property.
And you're the second person today asking for a full reviewable history — it's on the 1.1 list, and your exact use case ("what did Tidy put in the Trash before I empty it") is what I'll design it around. Today the panel shows recent activity + one-click undo; 1.1 turns that into a proper log.