Uninstall Skim on Mac

Export wanted Skim notes before uninstalling; ordinary PDF copies can lose annotations that live in extended attributes. The September 19, 2026 record covers the app copied from the official package.

Quit and remove the app

For documents whose annotations matter, choose File › Export… in Skim and select Skim Notes as the file format, then open the exported note file to check it. Quit Skim and move Skim.app to Trash; keep your PDFs and exported notes. The official page has more product information.

Review the app’s data

The cask lists exact Skim cache, bookmarks preferences, cookies, HTTP storage and saved state. It also names Apple Recent Documents and help-cache paths; those Apple-managed locations are not a reason to delete their parent folders.

If you installed it with Homebrew

The Homebrew cask has its own --zap list. brew uninstall --cask skim removes the cask without that list; brew uninstall --cask --zap skim also acts on its listed data without consulting Mole’s checkboxes. Its Apple recent-document stanza needs separate safety review; never remove the sharedfilelist parent. Mole also suppresses zap if its list would cross an unchecked, shared, unknown, or unsupported path; selected remnants still follow Mole’s own deletion path.

brew uninstall --cask skim

Check the result

These commands inspect the running process and one relevant location. They do not remove anything:

pgrep -il "Skim"
ls -ld "$HOME/Library/Preferences/net.sourceforge.skim-app.skim.bookmarks.plist"

No pgrep match means no process with that name is running; a match needs identification before quitting anything. A listed path still exists, while an ls “No such file” error means only that exact path is absent. A permission error is inconclusive.

What Mole lists

Mole selects exact bundle-ID cache and preference rows by default when safe. It leaves protected Apple sharedfilelist state alone and does not treat user PDFs or .skim exports as app remnants.

What this test covered

The September 19, 2026 official-package run left a Quick Look container, so it does not prove that every extension container was removed or that annotations were exported.