Uninstall Saft. For good. Really.

If you’re here, you know what I’m talking about. The Safari plugin sounds like a neat little tool but is a pesky customer on any computer. Not the way to win hearts. Deleting it doesn’t work, not do the instructions on their website.

Here is how I did.

1. First, close Safari. This is VERY important, as it does not work otherwise.
2. Start Terminal. (Go to Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal, or type Terminal in Spotlight).
3. Under Terminal type “sudo -s” without the quotation marks to log in as root.
4. Then enter:

   defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

5. Go to the blue (or gray) apple at the top left of the screen, then select Force Quit. From the menu of items, click on “Saft” and click on the Force Quit button.
6. Then, in the same Force Quit window, click on “Finder” and click the “Relaunch” button.
7. In the Finder window, on the top right bar (the Filter spotlight bar), type “saft” without the quotes. Delete with delight any file called Saft. Note: This may reveal a few other files that may contain the word “Saft” such as threads.py in my case (a Python file). Naturally, you want to NOT delete these. Just get rid of the Saft files.
8. Empty the trash. If there is a file that won’t delete because it’s in use, then Force Quit “Saft” again as in Step 5 above, and then Empty Trash again.
9. Go back into Terminal, and type “sudo -s” again without quotation marks. Then enter:

    defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE

   This will set the Finder back to the way it was before. Then type “exit” and it will exit out of the root.

10. Now navigate to the folder: /Library/InputManagers. Note that this is NOT the “Library” folder in your Users folder. This is the Library folder from the root. Inside InputManagers is the “saft” folder — get rid of it.
11. Empty Trash (again). If it says Saft is in use, reboot the machine and empty it then. Or if you use some excellent utility like MainMenu you can “Force Empty Trash”.

Go back to your happy, problem free Mac!