Uninstalling Inquisitor

For those of you who are into browser plugins, you may have run across a plugin called Inquisitor.  According to the website, Inquisitor:

speeds up your searches like no other

While this may be true after several searches I determined that I wanted to go back to using the default Safari search plugin features instead.  Unlike the XMarks plugin, the Inquisitor plugin doesn’t come with an uninstallation script.  The Inquisitor FAQ lists the following instructions on removing the plugin for Safari on Mac OS X:

• Navigate to your hard drive device
• Select the “Library” folder
• Select “InputManager” folder
• Delete the “Inquisitor” folder
• Restart Safari

My experience with this was not quite as nice as the FAQ would lead you to believe.  The main issue was that I had to actually logout of my user session before the bundle was released and could be emptied from the trash.

The second issue I had with the instructions was that they are incomplete.

Like many software developers on the Mac, David Watanabe, did not provide a complete uninstaller for the plugin, he just told you to go delete a few files.  I find this a very poor practice when writing software.  If you installer writes files and preferences to particular locations, then you should provide an uninstallation routine that removes those files.

After some searching, here is a list of the files that you need to remove in order to completely expunge Inquisitor from your system:

• /Library/InputManagers/Inquisitor/
• /Users/username/Library/Application Support/Inquisitor/
• /Library/Recipts/inquisitor.pkg
• /Library/Recipts/inquisitorPreflight.pkg

However, since this is a plugin for Safari that gives you options to configure, you should also take the time to remove the entries added to the Safari plist file.  The plist is named com.apple.Safari.plist and is stored in the /Users/username/Library/Preferences/ directory.

Here are the entries to remove from the plist file:

• kInquisitorAutocomplete
• kInquisitorBeaconEnabled
• kInquisitorNumberOfResults
• kInquisitorNumberOfSuggestions
• kInquisitorOrdering
• kInquisitorRepairDefaultShortcuts
• kInquisitorSearchHistory
• kInquisitorSearchSitesA
• kInquisitorSearchSource
• kInquisitorShowSearchViewA
• kInquisitorVersionCheck

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