LaunchBar duplicates

After my success at getting rid of Open With duplicates a couple of days ago, I decided to attack another duplicate problem: multiple copies of Transmit in my LaunchBar menu.

Multiples of Transmit in LaunchBar

These were, I learned, old copies of Transmit—versions 4.0.x and 4.1.x—that were, for some reason, being stored in subfolders of ~/Library/Application Support/Sparkle. My copy of Transmit predates the Mac App Store, so my updates always come via Transmit itself, which uses the Sparkle update system. My guess is that something was a little off in those older updates, and Sparkle left behind copies of the app when it updated Transmit.

There are at least a few ways to solve this problem:

  1. Delete the old copies of Transmit in ~/Library/Application Support/Sparkle. LaunchBar won’t index files that don’t exist.
  2. Stop LaunchBar from looking so deeply in my Library folder. I have its indexing rule for ~/Library set to Search All Subfolders. If I change that rule to search just one or two levels deep, LaunchBar won’t find those old apps.
  3. Set up an exclusion rule to keep LaunchBar from returning apps it finds in ~/Library.

I decided to do both 1 and 3. Those old copies aren’t doing me any good, so there’s no point in keeping them around. But as a bit of preventative maintenance, I figured there was also no point being able to launch any other apps that might get put or left in ~/Library, so I added this exclusion rule:

LaunchBar exclusion rule

It’s simple: don’t index anything that ends with .app.

I decided against Solution 2. I figured there must have been a reason I wanted to search all the subfolders of ~/Library, even though I can’t remember what that reason was. Best not to fiddle with that in case I break something.