Hiding Hard Drive Icons From Your Desktop 1
Tip
Hey
Here is a quick little trick which I find quite useful. Depending on how you work and organise your desktop, icons such as your Hard Drive and connected servers may never be used by yourself. They could be taken up valuable space. This can be further exasperated if you have a lot of Hard Drives and servers connected. Most of you desktop could be taken up by unused icons which you may never need to use. Its a rather simple method to remove icons such as Hard Drives, Servers and connected iPods from your desktop.
For once we are not going to use any Terminal trick. The answer lies within Finder’s preferences. The preference pane, for me, tends to be the first item I look at hen I use a new application or want something sorted. In Finder however a lot of the settings get changed within System Preferences, so it can get over looked. To open up the Preference pane, either go to Finder > Preferences or press Command + , (comma) with the Finder app selected. A little window similar to the following will open up. 
The check boxes at the top of the General tab or the ones we are looking for. De-select an items you don’t want. In a flash they are gone. Unfortunately you can deselect specific items, only groups of items. However if you want to free up some Desktop space, de-selecting any of the four items is recommend. I prefer removing “Connected Servers” from the list, after a good afternoon of moving files around I can have loads of connected servers on my desktop which starts to make things a bit messy.
Its just a simple tip, however I find it very useful. The simple ones tends to be the best.
Where To Next?
One Response to “Hiding Hard Drive Icons From Your Desktop”
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I like to have my Mac desktop clear of any files other than the ones I am working on and haven’t placed in folders yet. I often attach an external FireWire drive, which, when present, I would like to have appear on my desktop. Unfortunately, the Finder’s “Show these Items on the desktop – Hard Disks” selection gives you all of the disks or none of them.
SetFile can be used, if you have the Developer Tools installed, to hide selected drives. It works on the startup disk as well. In this case, one types:
% SetFile -a V /Volumes/Swap or
% SetFile -a V /This makes the swap volume and the root volume invisible, but still shows mounted external hard drives when they are present. Logout and back on for the changes to take affect.
In dialog boxes, with Finder key commands, and the like, the computer operates normally and all partitions are visible, but I don’t have my desk cluttered with drives that I know are there already. And when I have my backup drive installed, it shows up on my desktop just as it ought to.
To make the file or folder visible again, use a lowercase ‘v’
% SetFile -a v /
Comment By Steve Buchen on June 21st, at 4:30 pm