dekstop icon yosemite

OS X: How to quickly hide the desktop icons

Do you often have to do a presentation on your Mac and don’t want others to see what’s on your desktop? It’s possible to quickly hide the icons on your desktop. Launch Terminal and enter the following command. 

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool FALSE; killall Finder

You still can access your icons (documents) in Finder ▸ Desktop. To unhide the icons, launch Terminal and enter the following command.

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop TRUE; killall Finder

preview desktop osx

3 thoughts on “OS X: How to quickly hide the desktop icons”

  1. There’s a typo in the second command (the one for restoring icons to the Desktop). The single quote following ‘true’ should be a semicolon.

  2. actually should be
    defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool FALSE
    killall Finder

    the important thing to say is that this completely disable “on-screen” desktop. you cannot drag&drop anything, you cannot create anything.

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