Creating the TcNo osu! Cleaner

osu! is a rhythm game. Users download thousands of music files, backgrounds, skins, images, and more - Most of which are disabled for performance or preference. The osu! Cleaner looks through those files and removes what the user requests, saving drive space and removing thousands of files.

This is a fork of github.com/henntix/osu-cleaner with faster processing, and a much better look!

This project reached over 20,000 downloads on GitHub.

The Problem

Henntix’s osu! Cleaner was not updated for years at the time, had open issues, pull requests, and more. The program was also in need of a facelift.

Features (vs. the original)

• Move Songs: Using the power of Symlink Junctions: Your Massive (Multi GB) osu! library can be moved to another drive without worry.
• Delete (actually) unused files: Auto-deletes thumbs.db, desktop.ini and .DS_Store files added by beatmap creators’ computers (or yours).
• List uncommon file types: zips and other file types sometimes find their way into beatmaps. While unused in-game, they could be distributed and take up space needlessly.
• Right-click Context Menu: to copy the location of files to inspect what they are before marking for deletion.
• Dark mode theme: Easier on the eyes. github.com/RobinPerris/DarkUI was the main inspiration, and was built-upon heavily.
• Optimized: Extra iterations through each file removed.
• Fixed: Crashes due to PathTooLongException fixed, and missing file types like .mp4 added, instead of just .avi and .flv
• .NET Framework 4.8: Updated runtime

Difficulties

• osu! stores files on C:/ usually, if a user installs it in the default location. This isn’t a worry typically, but as you play more and download more beatmaps, the folder grows rapidly. Mine reached a point of being over 90 GB+. A lot of this space is used by backgrounds (which osu! gamers frequently set the opacity in-game to 0, making it a black background).

While these backgrounds are required, and without default ones would be used, this program offers to replace them with 1×1 pixel images, leaving users with black backgrounds as they seek.