If you work on an iOS or OS X app that uses Strings files to store localized display text, over time those files can accumulate entries that are no longer used. Perhaps a developer forgot to remove a resource string when refactoring a view controller, or rapidly changing requirements caused a flurry of changes to display text that was never properly cleaned up. If you share my obsession for having no unused or unnecessary things in a codebase, check out my new tool that finds these abandoned strings.

I posted this simple tool on GitHub, along with some information about what the tool can do and what it cannot do.

https://github.com/ijoshsmith/abandoned-strings

Just pass the root directory of your project’s source code as a command line argument and wait a few moments while the program does what would take an OCD-enslaved developer hours to accomplish by hand!