macOS Tip: Hide the Desktop

Feb 25, 2021
An icon-free desktop.

Found this great tutorial on how to temporarily hide the icons on your macOS desktop. I’ve used it several times, so I thought I’d share it here.

In a nutshell:

# Hide icons
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop false
killall Finder

# Unhide icons
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop true
killall Finder

This is quite useful for making your desktop a little bit cleaner while screen sharing. It also doubles as a potential prank…