File Buddy offers two mechanisms for deleting language resources, one that only deletes disabled languages and another that will delete both enabled and disabled languages.
This is the safest approach since it gives you the opportunity to disable languages and see if any problems result before permanently deleting them. Languages in an application can be disabled individually using the Finder’s Get Info window, or multiple languages can be disabled in multiple applications using File Buddy’s command. However the languages are disabled, File Buddy’s command can be used to delete all disable language resources in one or more specified directories.
Select one or more languages in a Languages Inventory window list and do one of the following:
- Click the Delete button to delete the selected languages. You will be asked to confirm this action. If you confirm, File Buddy will immediately delete the specified language resources from the locations searched. There is no option to move them to the trash and the only way to restore them later is to reinstall the affected software.
- Click the View in List button to display the language resource .lproj folders corresponding to the selected languages in a List window. The folders can then be deleted in the usual way.
There are a significant number of language resources in the System folder. To delete these and possibly others to which you do not normally have sufficient access, File Buddy’s administrator mode will need to enabled, so you should do that before starting the process of deleting languages if you want to delete those resources.
File Buddy will not delete English resources because some parts of the system require them, nor will it remove all languages from an application.
While removing language resources you don’t use should be safe, it’s possible that one or more software products you use might make unexpected assumptions about language resource availability. As such, SkyTag Software cannot guarantee that you will not experience unexpected results if you delete language resources. This should not be the case, but we have no control over how other software is written. The safer approach to removing unused languages is to disable the languages you want to delete, use your Mac for a while to ensure there are no problems, and then delete disabled languages. If you encounter any problems you can simply reenable the problem languages without having to reinstall anything.
