Want to hide your osX (macbook) desktop icons

This is just a quick hint as to how to hide desktop icons (all of them) in a temporary fashion.

I create a lot of video demos that make it a pain when I have my personal icons to documents, folders, and other content I don't really want to have posted all over the Internet.

Here is how to do it:

Hide Desktop Icons

Launch Terminal and type the following:
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false

Kill the Finder so that it relaunches:
killall Finder

Files are now discretely hidden in home folder’s “Desktop” directory. To reverse, open Terminal and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true

Kill the Finder so that it relaunches and they are back.

If you want to automate these into a single click of your mouse button, just put this into a file, make it executable, create an alias, and drop the alias file onto your task bar. One for icons on and one for icons off: #!/bin/bash

# 1. copy this code to file iconson.command
# 2. make executable with 'chmod +x iconson.command
# 3. make alias file and drop onto menu bar
#
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true

killall Finder


#!/bin/bash

# 1. copy this code to file iconsoff.command
# 2. make executable with 'chmod +x iconson.command
# 3. make alias file and drop onto menu bar
#
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false

killall Finder

Now you can clean your desk for screencasts and video capturing and put it all back when you are done by clicking on the files!