a tiny ram for your RAM

tldr; baa lives in your menu bar, tells you when your mac is about to run out of RAM or disk, finds the stuff quietly eating it, and frees it in one click.

i built this because my mac keeps running out of RAM every 2 hours and i typically get around it by closing random apps and hoping it will help (it usually doesn't).

baa 🐏 is a little ram that headbutts all of that out of your mac.

• lives in your menu bar as 🐏 + how much RAM is free. turns 🟡 / 🟠 / 🔴 when things are getting tight
• finds stuff you forgot was still running:
  • 👻 apps and scripts that should've closed but didn't
  • 🤖 things ai agents started and forgot about
  • 💤 big stuff just sitting there idle (agent sessions idle for hours, docker with no containers, an ollama model still loaded)
• tells you how much RAM you'd get back, and frees it in one click
• pings you a few minutes before you run out
• also finds dev junk filling up your disk (old builds, package caches etc.) and trashes it in one click
• plays a tiny baa when it frees something 🐑 (you can mute it but it's the best part imo)

brew tap selviarora/baa https://github.com/selviarora/baa
brew install selviarora/baa/baa
brew services start baa

that builds baa on your mac, starts it in your menu bar (and at every login), and adds the baa command. needs macOS 14+.

git clone https://github.com/selviarora/baa && cd baa
./install.sh

basically baa looks for stuff that's still running but not doing anything:

• its app or terminal is closed but it's still going
• an ai agent started it and it's been sitting idle for 15+ min
• it's big and hasn't used any cpu in a while

it also watches memory pressure (the green / yellow / red graph in activity monitor), not just how much RAM is used. macs use most of their RAM all the time and that's usually ok!

it will also never kill anything on its own.

if you used brew:

brew services stop baa && brew uninstall baa

if you built it yourself:

launchctl bootout gui/$(id -u)/com.selvi.baa
rm -rf ~/Applications/Baa.app ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.selvi.baa.plist ~/.local/bin/baa

vibecoded this in 30 mins so hopefully nothing is broken!