How to uninstall PasteNow on Mac

PasteNow keeps your clipboard history, everything you copied including text you may not want kept, in an App Group folder, ~/Library/Group Containers/KAQ3M6FSM7.app.pastenow.PasteNow. Mole lists that folder but leaves it unticked, so your history stays on the Mac unless you choose to remove it. These steps cover PasteNow downloaded from pastenow.app and the Homebrew cask pastenow; the Mac App Store version was not tested.

Decide what happens to your clipboard history

The history sits in the Documents folder inside that App Group folder, as a PasteNow.sqlite database plus a support folder for larger items. PasteNow does not document this location; it is what this test found on disk.

• To keep it, leave the folder alone. A reinstall of PasteNow on this Mac uses the same App Group folder. For an extra copy, quit PasteNow and copy the whole KAQ3M6FSM7.app.pastenow.PasteNow folder to another drive.
• To remove it, quit PasteNow, then either tick the Group Container row in Mole or move the folder to the Trash in Finder. Empty the Trash afterwards if the history held passwords or other private text, because until then it is still on disk.

PasteNow's privacy policy says clipboard history can be stored and synced through iCloud. If you turned sync on, your history is also in your iCloud account and on your other devices, and removing anything on this Mac does not delete those copies.

Quit PasteNow and remove the app

1. Quit PasteNow from its menu bar icon.
2. Move PasteNow from the Applications folder to the Trash.
3. PasteNow ships a small login helper inside the app. If you set PasteNow to open at login, open System Settings › General › Login Items & Extensions and remove any PasteNow entry still listed there.
4. If you allowed PasteNow under System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility, remove it from that list too; removing the app does not do it for you.

Where PasteNow keeps its data

Check the result

Run these read-only commands in Terminal:

pgrep -il pastenow
ls -d ~/Library/Group\ Containers/*.app.pastenow.PasteNow
du -sh ~/Library/Group\ Containers/*.app.pastenow.PasteNow

• No output from pgrep means PasteNow has quit.
• ls -d printing the path means your clipboard history is still on this Mac, which is what you want if you kept it. An error such as "no matches found" or "No such file or directory" means the folder is gone.
• du -sh shows how much space the history takes.

If you installed it with Homebrew

Mole skips --zap when its list reaches unchecked or shared data, or cannot be fully checked, and still cleans the leftovers you selected.

The pastenow cask's zap list includes ~/Library/Group Containers/*.app.pastenow.PasteNow, the folder with your clipboard history, plus the matching Application Scripts folder, ~/Library/Containers/app.pastenow.PasteNow, caches, HTTP storage and preferences. Running brew uninstall --cask --zap pastenow yourself moves all of them to the Trash, whatever you ticked in Mole. To keep your history, remove only the app:

brew uninstall --cask pastenow

What Mole lists

This is how Mole handles PasteNow installed from the official download:

• The App Group folder ~/Library/Group Containers/KAQ3M6FSM7.app.pastenow.PasteNow and its Application Scripts folder are listed but not selected. If you tick them, Mole first checks that no other installed app uses the same group; when it cannot confirm that, it keeps the folder and the row says so.
• The preferences file, ~/Library/Caches/app.pastenow.PasteNow, ~/Library/Caches/CloudKit/app.pastenow.PasteNow, ~/Library/Caches/SentryCrash/PasteNow, the HTTP storage and the temporary cache folder are selected by default.
• iCloud copies of your history and the Mac App Store version's container were not part of the test.

What this test covered

On September 26, 2026, PasteNow 2.33 was installed from the official package Homebrew's cask points to, checked against its checksum and copied into Applications, launched once without copying anything into it or turning on iCloud sync, and uninstalled with a development build of Mole with every listed row ticked, including the App Group rows. Mole's Status page showed PasteNow as one row with two processes. The app and six rows, seven items in all, went to the Trash. The App Group folder (3.4 MB) and its Application Scripts folder stayed: while the uninstall ran, other test apps were registered on the Mac, the list of installed apps changed under Mole's ownership check, and Mole kept the group rather than guess. An iCloud key-value file that macOS keeps for PasteNow under ~/Library/Daemon Containers also stayed; the system manages it. The login helper was never turned on, so no login item appeared, and the Homebrew cask was not uninstalled. An earlier test on September 23, 2026 removed the preferences, caches, CloudKit cache, crash reports and HTTP storage, and kept the App Group folders then too, because leftover test apps with broken signatures on that Mac left Mole's ownership check incomplete.