Show / Hide Desktop Icons For Mac

I, like many others, have pretty much given up on having icons on my desktop, whether I'm using a Mac or a PC. Wallpapers are just too nice to be covered up, but sometimes you can't avoid having a few useful files or icons on the desktop.

Show / Hide Desktop Icons is a helpful app, created with Automator, that can quickly hide or reveal these items, allowing you to keep them handy while also having a beautiful, clutter-free desktop.

While you can hide desktop icons on macOS without any third-party software, this involves entering a command in Terminal, and then another to reveal the hidden icons. Needless to say, this isn't a particularly intuitive or efficient approach.

Show / Hide Desktop Icons was created by taking a fairly simple shell script and turning it into a user-friendly Automator app that can toggle icons with a single click.

Once you have unpacked the archive, move the app to your Dock. This is important in order to allow you to easily enable desktop icons again. Then, just click the Dock icon once to hide everything, and twice to reveal them.

The app is indeed very simple to use, though it is worth noting that you will not be able to access the right-click context menu on your desktop while icons are hidden.

When disabling and enabling icons, the app also uses your system voice to play an audio message informing you that icons are hidden or revealed. I feel this is unnecessary, and quite irritating, but there is no option to disable this feature.

While I would love it if the voice notification could be disabled, that is really my only gripe. If you're looking for an easy way to toggle desktop icons on or off, Show / Hide Desktop Icons will do the job nicely.