How can I fix this problem on my Mac?

Question

When I clicked on the Finder and my username, I open the Applications folder, and there was nothing in it. Somehow (a long time ago) I had deleted its contents. However, when I typed Applications in the search in the top right corner of the Mac, it gave me a folder called Applications with all my Adobe products, MAMP and other software in it. So what I did was "copy all" on those applications and dragged them to the empty Applications folder under my username. But then it said it was copying 45,599 items and 13.06 GB of data. I don't think I should have done it this way. It's taking a long time to copy and I don't think I really wanted to duplicate the data. What can I do

a) to reverse what I did (if I did indeed duplicate all the data)

b) and then get those applications LISTED in the right folder without duplicating the data

Answer 1

You have two different Applications folders. There's ~/Applications, which is the one under your own directory, and is for applications that you want to install for your use only. There's also /Applications, which is the main application folder, for use by all users on the machine, and is where the App Store and applications that have installers will normally install themselves.

It sounds like you've copied everything from /Applications into ~/Applications, and I'd recommend just deleting it all from ~/Applications (once you've verified that it's all still in /Applications as well) and keeping all your applications in /Applications.