MacOS – Help me un-clutter the first page of apps on Launchpad

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I have grown very fond of a sparse first page of apps on iOS and want to hack, reverse-engineer, and/or fake out Launchpad to get a clean first page of apps.

Here is a picture from iOS that is analagous to what I want to accomplish:

enter image description here

I don't need a text overlay at the top (bars, ATT, time, etc…) or the row of icons at the bottom – I just want space on the first screen, followed by subsequent pages that can be totally full (or ideally also have flexible space). I don't need precise control such as a gap between say pages and numbers, but that would be really neat to emulate a layout exactly as pictured (three apps at the top, four at the bottom).

If it's not possible to hack in a true into the Launchpad database, can anyone show how to make "dummy invisible apps" that I could one by one drag to displace the apps I don't want on page one?

Best Answer

To summarize...

As in iOS, you can organize your Launchpad icons as you please using drag-and-drop. You can reorder apps, move them from one page to another, and even put them in iOS-like folders. Note that Launchpad folders are entirely independent from the /Applications hierarchy: creating a folder in Launchpad won't create a folder in /Applications, for example.

Your problem seems to be related to the fact that you've got so many apps. Again like iOS, there seems to be a maximum on the number of pages of apps Launchpad can handle. If you really need all 400+ apps on your Launchpad, there's not much you can do other than reorganize everything into folders to free up some slots. But I doubt you need instant access to everything Adobe has ever installed on your computer, so you have a few more options to clean out your Launchpad:

  1. Delete apps entirely. There's probably a few apps on your computer that are just sitting there, never to be used; you can free up space on your Launchpad and on your hard drive by getting rid of them.
    • Apps from the App Store can be uninstalled directly from Launchpad by holding option/alt and clicking on the black X over the app's icon.
    • Any app can be deleted by dragging it from the Finder to the Trash.
    • Alternately, you can use something like AppZapper to delete an app along with any hidden auxiliary files.
  2. Move apps out of Launchpad's sight. Launchpad looks for apps in /Applications, /Developer, and ~/Applications. If you like those folders to be as pristine as your Launchpad, you can move your extraneous applications to a different folder. Launchpad will lose track of them as of the next reboot.
  3. Just remove the Launchpad icons. Finally, Andreas Ganske has developed a preference pane which modifies the Launchpad database to show or hide whatever applications you want.

If you just want a clean Launchpad, option three is probably your best and easiest answer. Options one and two are there if you like to keep your /Applications folder clean, too: useless apps might as well be deleted, and your CS4 uninstallers could probably be moved somewhere a little more out of the way until you need them.

Finally, you hint at having problems with having Launchpad duplicates. As I mentioned in an answer to this question, this may be a problem of actually having more than one copy of the same app installed.

Hope this helps clear up some of your upgrade troubles!

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