You can use the free HiddenMe app, Terminal commands, or AppleScript Editor. There are various ways you can hide your icons. Basically, you can hide or show your Desktop icons when you need them. And you can always make them visible again. When you hide your app icons and files from your desktop, they are no longer seen on the desktop, but you can still find them in Finder. Or you can just hide them if you don't want to delete anything. That's why you should clear your desktop from all unnecessary files to make your everyday life easier and less stressful. It can become time-consuming and nerve-wracking when navigating through new and old files on your desktop, trying to find that one screenshot or an important document you need so urgently. Now let’s make the icons big again, but this time let’s also make the text larger by choosing 12pt instead of 10pt in the window.3 Fast And Easy Ways to Hide Desktop Icons on MacĮven if you like chaos, sometimes it's frustrating to have your desktop cluttered with files. Very space efficient, but not very easy to work with! What happens if you make the icons super, super tiny? Then the available space for text reduces too, as you’d expect: To fix that simply adjust Grid spacing too: Notice how everything’s jammed together, however. You might find your Mom’s computer has a default icon size of 44 x 44 or 48 x 48, but you can change it! Notice also the Grid spacing, which controls how tightly the icons fit together.

If you hold down the Control key and click on the desktop, you’ll get the Desktop context menu:Īs you can see, choose “ Show View Options” from the menu.Īnd you’ll get a nifty little window with all the options you need to tweak and explore:

To start, exactly as it was displayed on my own Mac OS X El Capitan system, here are some folder and file icons: That’s pretty easy to do, but let’s look at all the different options and how they can affect what’s shown on-screen. So instead of artificially lowering the resolution of your Mom’s Mac screen, the better solution is to tweak the Finder settings for the Desktop. You can experiment with that by going to the Display System Preference, but there’s a much smarter way to fix things! After all, change the resolution and every program suffers, even the games, streaming video content, and Web browser, so I always see that as an option of last resort.

The classic way to make everything on a computer screen larger is to lower the resolution: the smaller the computer thinks the screen is, the larger everything ends up being to compensate.

How to show mac desktop icons