Uninstall | MoreDisplays

There is no installer and nothing outside your user folder, so there is not much to undo. The parts people miss are the configuration directory, the copy in iCloud, and the privileged service if you ever switched it on.

If Share groups across my Macs is on, turn it off before you delete anything. Otherwise the deletion is a local absence with nothing to record it, and the library on your other Mac is untouched but your intent is lost.

Turning it off in Settings stops anything further going up. To remove what is already there, see step 7.

Do this before the app goes, while the switch that installed it is still there to turn off.

In Settings, turn Displays at the login window off. That unregisters the service, which is the whole removal: the binary lives inside the app bundle rather than in /Library, so nothing is left in a system directory to find.

If the app is already gone and a service is still registered, the entry is in System Settings, General, Login Items, under the items allowed to run in the background, and it can be removed there. To stop one that is running right now, without waiting for a restart:

# launchctl bootout system/pro.moredisplays.daemon

3. Deactivate and quit

$ mdctl deactivate && osascript -e 'quit app "MoreDisplays"'
Deactivated "Office".

Every virtual display goes with the app.

4. Remove the command line tool, if you have one

mdctl is not inside the current disk image, so unless you put a copy on your PATH yourself there is nothing here to remove.

# rm -f /usr/local/bin/mdctl

5. Remove the app

# rm -rf /Applications/MoreDisplays.app

6. Remove configuration, backups and the socket

This is the step short instructions leave out. Groups, settings, every dated backup and the socket all live in one directory.

$ rm -rf "~/Library/Application Support/MoreDisplays"

$ rm -f ~/Library/Preferences/pro.moredisplays.app.plist && rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/pro.moredisplays.app

On a Mac with more than one account, this has to run for each account that ever launched the app.

$ cp "~/Library/Application Support/MoreDisplays/config.json" ~/Desktop/moredisplays-groups-backup.json

7. Remove the shared copy in iCloud

The library lives in your own iCloud key-value storage under the app’s identifier. It is removed when you remove the app’s data through System Settings, iCloud, Manage, or it simply stops being read once nothing asks for it.

There is no server belonging to this project, so there is nothing to delete anywhere else. If you have another Mac still running the app, the library is on that Mac too and deleting here does not remove it there.

# sfltool remove-item-for-app-bundle-id pro.moredisplays.app
Removed 1 item.

If sfltool reports nothing, the login item was already gone. It also disappears on the next restart once the bundle is missing.

9. Confirm

$ ls /Applications/MoreDisplays.app /usr/local/bin/mdctl "~/Library/Application Support/MoreDisplays" 2>&1
ls: /Applications/MoreDisplays.app: No such file or directory
ls: /usr/local/bin/mdctl: No such file or directory
ls: ~/Library/Application Support/MoreDisplays: No such file or directory

Three “no such file” lines is a clean uninstall.

What is deliberately left behind

Nothing. No receipt, no keychain item, no kernel extension, no system extension and no account. The one privileged service this app can install ships inside the bundle and goes with it, which is step 2 and the reason that step comes first.

The app has never sent anything to a server belonging to this project, so there is nothing to delete on one. Privacy is short for the same reason.

1. Turn off sharing first, if you use it

2. Turn off the login window service, if you switched it on