How to uninstall Lingma on Mac

Lingma (通义灵码), Alibaba Cloud's AI IDE with the bundle ID com.aliyun.lingma.ide, has been discontinued. Alibaba Cloud's Qoder CN IDE changelog records that Lingma IDE 0.11.2 added an upgrade to Qoder CN IDE that carries over your chat history, rules, memories, agents and code index, and in this test signing in to Lingma sent the account on to Qoder CN. If you are moving to the Qoder CN products, do that before you delete anything, so the upgrade can still find your data. This guide covers the Lingma IDE downloaded from Alibaba Cloud's official download page. Qoder CN has its own guide.

Quit Lingma

  1. Save your work and quit Lingma from its app menu or with Command-Q.
  2. Search for Lingma in Activity Monitor and check that its processes have exited.
  3. Open System Settings › General › Login Items & Extensions and turn off any Lingma entry that is still listed. None was added in this test.

Move Lingma to Trash

Open the Applications folder in Finder and move Lingma to Trash.

Where Lingma keeps its files

In Finder, press Shift + Command + G and check each location. Skip the ones that do not exist.

Location What it holds What to do
~/Library/Application Support/Lingma Editor data in the usual VS Code layout: settings, workspace state and logs (75 MB in this test) Back up anything you want to keep, then remove it
~/.lingma Extensions Lingma imported from VS Code on first launch (98 MB in this test) and argv.json See below before you remove it
~/Library/Caches/com.aliyun.lingma.ide, ~/Library/HTTPStorages/com.aliyun.lingma.ide Cache and web storage Remove with the app
~/Library/Preferences/com.aliyun.lingma.ide.plist, ~/Library/Preferences/Lingma.plist Preferences Remove with the app

~/.lingma is not only the IDE's folder. Qoder CN's FAQ says its JetBrains and VS Code plugins, the former Tongyi Lingma plugins, still use .lingma for their files and processes. Keep the folder if you use either plugin; otherwise look inside and remove it yourself. The descriptions in the table come from what this test observed on disk.

Check the result

pgrep -il lingma
ls -d /Applications/Lingma.app
ls -d "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Lingma" ~/.lingma
  • No output from pgrep means no Lingma process is running. A listed process means the IDE is still open, or a JetBrains or VS Code plugin is running its own Lingma process; that one belongs to the plugin, so leave it.
  • ls -d /Applications/Lingma.app printing the path means the app is still there.
  • The last ls -d prints each folder that still exists and reports "No such file or directory" for the rest. A surviving ~/.lingma is expected when you leave that row unticked or a plugin still uses it.

Lingma did not add a login item, a command in /usr/local/bin or a line to your shell configuration in this test. No Homebrew cask for Lingma was found. Removing the app does not cancel an Alibaba Cloud subscription or close your account. For other AI coding tools and what they leave behind, see Clean Up AI Coding Tools on Mac: Caches, CLIs, Transcripts.

What Mole lists

When you remove Lingma with Mole:

  • Preferences (com.aliyun.lingma.ide.plist and Lingma.plist), caches, cookies, web storage, temporary caches and the recent-documents entry are selected by default, and so are the rebuildable caches and logs inside ~/Library/Application Support/Lingma (Cache, Code Cache, GPUCache, DawnGraphiteCache, DawnWebGPUCache, blob_storage, logs).
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Lingma itself is listed for review. With Default remove app data off it starts unchecked; with it on, eligible app data can start checked. Finish migration and back up wanted settings before removal, or uncheck it.
  • ~/.lingma is also reviewed data and can start checked with that option on. Mole does not check for the JetBrains or VS Code plugins, so uncheck the folder while either still uses it.

What this test covered

Lingma 0.11.4 was downloaded from Alibaba Cloud's official download page, copied into Applications and signed in on September 28, 2026. The account had no quota, so a question got no answer, and the test measured only what the app wrote on first launch. On September 29 it was quit and removed with a development build of Mole with every row ticked, in a run with other AI apps. Before removal Mole's Status page showed Lingma as one row of 16 processes using 1.05 GB. The app and its support data went to the Trash. ~/.lingma (98 MB) was not in Mole's list in that run, and Mole lists it now. An earlier run on September 22, 2026 removed the same version, a 659.8 MB app and 54.2 MB of support data, and ~/.lingma (92 MB) was not listed then either. The upgrade to Qoder CN IDE, the JetBrains and VS Code plugins and signing out were not tested.