Uncluttering the Mac Desktop

I’ve previously been a big fan of camouflage which does something really simple:

• Hides all the icons from your desktop
• When you click on your desktop, opens a finder window for your desktop

Thus normally, day to day, I get my lovely desktop images without any clutter. If I need a file, I just have to click, and a window appears with what I want.

The problem is that Camouflage started segfaulting ever since I upgraded to 10.5 Leopard, using Spaces which I love (I’d used virtual desktops on KDE and GNOME before but they’d never “clicked” the way Spaces does for me).

I contacted the developer, who did a heroic effort to try and track down the source of the bugs, but we never did find a fix.

I finally got fed up with the periodic segfaults. I’ve come up with the following less than perfect solution, but it seems to work.

• Create a folder on my desktop, which I call “D”
• Move everything else, except “D” and my HardDisk into D
• Make a alias / shortcut / symlink of my Harddisk icon inside D
• Finder -> Preferences -> General and uncheck the appropriate boxes so that Harddisks, external drives etc aren’t shown.
• From the Finder Desktop, View -> Show View Options (or Apple+J), and shrink the icon size to 16x16, and set Label Position to “Right”
• Position my “D” folder top right of the screen.

Now, my desktop is clear and uncluttered with the one exception of this tiny little “D” folder.

If I want to get at all my Desktop files, I just need to (double) click on my “D” folder.

It’s not as good as Camouflage because I can’t click anywhere, and I still have that one little icon sitting around. But it’s good enough and it doesn’t crash all the time.

ps. If you have your Exposé preferences set to “show desktop” on one of your hot corners, you need to move your “D” folder in a little from the side of the screen else you won’t be able to click it when you throw your mouse to the hot corner to reveal your desktop.