One Thing Well

Clean

Clean your desktop with one click or clean automatically every day.

A free app that moves every file on your Desktop (or any other directory) to dated directories elsewhere.

Desktop Cleaning

Over on Minimal Linux, readers have been submitting scripts to tidy up the Desktop into nice dated folders, inspired by Minimal Mac’s pointer to Desktoday

I don’t have a desktop on Linux, but ~/temp serves a similar purpose. Rather than tidy it, I run the following once a week via cron:

 rm -rf /home/jack/temp/*

Similarly, on the Mac, Hazel trashes all files on my Desktop or in Downloads as soon as they’re a week old.

My reasoning being that if I haven’t done anything with a file within a week of downloading or creating it, I probably didn’t need it in the first place. And, of course, if you know your computer is planning to delete your stuff on a regular basis, you make sure the stuff you do want to keep is promptly filed where it belongs.

bgs

The bgs program allows you to tailor the appearance of the background (“root”) window on a workstation display running X.

Ratpoison

Ratpoison is a simple Window Manager with no fat library dependencies, no fancy graphics, no window decorations, and no rodent dependence.

One for the keyboard junkies.

Camouflage

Do you have way too many items on your desktop? Do you hate cleaning up that mess? Camouflage is the right utility for you. It hides all the icons and leaves nothing but the pure wallpaper.

Just in case killing the Desktop is a step to far.

Thanks, Andrew.

Goodbye Desktop

If you want to stop anything appearing on your Mac’s Desktop, but want to keep files in the ~/Desktop directory, open Terminal and run the following:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool FALSE ; killall Finder

After that you won’t see any icons on your Desktop—no files, no folders, no disks; just the pretty picture.

To reverse the process, run the command again, replacing FALSE with TRUE.