Why Reclaim only ever moves files to Trash — never rm

Any tool that finds gigabytes of files and offers to delete them in bulk has to answer one question before anything else: what happens if it's wrong? Reclaim's answer is to make the deletion path itself hard to misuse, rather than relying only on the user reading a warning carefully.

Every delete action in Reclaim — whether it's one duplicate file or a bulk selection of forty node_modules folders — moves items to the macOS Trash. It's the same operation as dragging a file to the Trash in Finder, which means it's recoverable the same way: if a selection turns out to include something you needed, it's sitting in Trash, not gone.

Core system locations — /System, /Library, /Applications, /Users, and other protected paths — are hardcoded as undeletable at the engine level, in the Rust backend, not just filtered out of the interface. That distinction matters: it means there's no UI state or selection combination that can trick the app into offering to delete something in a protected location.

Before anything is sent to Trash, Reclaim shows a confirmation modal with the exact item count and total size. A persistent “trash cart” also lets you stage deletions from multiple different views — Duplicates, Large Files, Dev Cleanup — and review the whole batch together before committing, instead of committing to each one in isolation.