MacOS – Hide files/icons on the desktop but not in finder

desktopfindermacos

Not sure if something like this exists in OSX. I would like to display a cheatsheet on my desktop as a wallpaper and to make it visible at all times I would like to hide all the icons/files/folders scattered on my desktop as I'm accessing them only from within the Finder anyway. So my question is if it is possible to hide everything on the desktop and show the wallpaper only but use the Desktop folder as normal and see all the files and folders when in Finder view?
Using OSX Mountain Lion.

Best Answer

In the terminal, do this:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false && killall Finder

After this, there'll be nothing on your Desktop (but still in ~/Desktop, i.e. your Desktop Folder). It'll look like this:

Clean Desktop

Beautiful, isn't it? If you want to change it back:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true && killall Finder

enter image description here

Related Solutions

MacOS – Hide certain files/folders from “All My Files”

See this this morning on Mac OS X Hints.com:

10.7: Customize All My Files

I agree that in the case of pros, this All my files thing is quite useless because there is way too many files. This is more a consumer-level thing.

MacOS – Automatically hide latex aux files in finder (files with a certain extension)

Hiding all files isn’t implemented on a system level: make a certain file type hidden

Hiding files one by one is trivial:

 chflags hidden /path/to/*\.aux

I haven't seen a way to implement all the logic required to do what you ask, but I have seen people make up smart folders to show only specific files in a folder that match the good extensions. If your list of places where you want to filter is small, that effort will be less than scripting the hide tool you need.

Have you ruled out configuring latex to put all auxiliary files in a hidden subdirectory/folder that you name with a dot like .tmp? This is shown here for pdflatex -output-directory=\.tmp

Alternatively, you could use a make tool like rubber or latexmk to either run your custom hide script or even discard those files when you compile successfully. You’d only then need to mark in some way what folders get the hidden treatment.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – Hide certain files/folders from “All My Files”

MacOS – Automatically hide latex aux files in finder (files with a certain extension)

Related Question