How to uninstall Caffeine on Mac
Caffeine is a menu bar toggle that keeps your Mac awake. It keeps no documents, and in the recorded test it had written almost nothing to disk, so there is nothing to back up first. These steps cover the DMG IntelliScape publishes for Caffeine and the Homebrew cask caffeine, which install the same app; the recorded test used the Homebrew cask.
Quit Caffeine and remove the app
Caffeine has no Dock icon. Click its menu bar icon and choose Quit, then move Caffeine from Applications to the Trash.
Where Caffeine keeps its data
The Homebrew cask's zap list names the four locations below. In Finder, press Shift + Command + G and check each one; on a Mac where Caffeine saw little use, most will not exist.
| Location | What it holds | What to do |
|---|---|---|
~/Library/Application Support/com.intelliscapesolutions.caffeine |
App support data | Safe to remove |
~/Library/Caches/com.intelliscapesolutions.caffeine |
Cache | Safe to remove |
~/Library/HTTPStorages/com.intelliscapesolutions.caffeine.binarycookies |
Cookies for the app's network requests | Safe to remove |
~/Library/Preferences/com.intelliscapesolutions.caffeine.plist |
App preferences | Safe to remove |
In the test none of these existed. The only data was an empty folder named after Caffeine's bundle id in macOS's per-user temporary cache area under /var/folders, which went to the Trash with the app. A missing row above is expected, not a sign that something went wrong.
Check the result
Run these read-only commands in Terminal:
pgrep -il caffeine
ls -d ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.intelliscapesolutions.caffeine ~/Library/Preferences/com.intelliscapesolutions.caffeine.plist
No output from pgrep means Caffeine is not running. For ls, "No such file or directory" means that path was never created or is already gone; a printed path means it is still on disk and you can decide whether to remove it.
If you installed it with Homebrew
The caffeine cask's zap list is the four paths in the table above. Running brew uninstall --cask --zap caffeine yourself removes whichever of them exist, whatever you ticked in Mole; without --zap it removes only the app:
brew uninstall --cask caffeine
When Mole removes a Homebrew-installed Caffeine, all four zap entries sit inside ~/Library and match rows Mole selects by default, so Mole runs --zap unless you untick one of them.
What Mole lists
The Application Support, Caches, HTTPStorages and preferences entries above, and the temporary cache folder under /var/folders, are named after Caffeine's own bundle id, so Mole lists and selects each one by default whenever it exists.
What this test covered
Caffeine was installed from the Homebrew cask caffeine and uninstalled on September 17, 2026 with Mole 1.15 Preview (build 272), in a batch of eight casks. The app and an empty temporary cache folder went to the Trash and the cask receipt was cleared; no Application Support, Caches, HTTPStorages or preferences entry existed to test. A Mac with saved Caffeine preferences and the direct DMG were not covered.