Updated
How to Hide Desktop Icons on Mac
With Supercharge
- Open Supercharge, and give it the access that it asks for in “Device Control and Data Access”.
- Click its icon in the menu bar, and choose “Desktop Icons”. The icons go away.
- To show them again, choose “Desktop Icons” again. A checkmark shows when the icons are visible.
This is good before a presentation, a screen share, or a screenshot. To hide and show the icons with a keyboard shortcut, open the Supercharge settings, click “Shortcuts”, and set a shortcut for “Desktop icons”. In the same menu, “Desktop Widgets” and “Desktop Icons & Widgets” hide the widgets too.
Like the setting of macOS, the hidden icons show again in Mission Control and when you click the wallpaper to show the desktop. To hide them there too, click the button next to “Desktop icons” in the “Shortcuts” settings, and turn on “Hide icons permanently”. Then each change restarts Finder, which brings its windows to the front.
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$20, one-time purchase, plus tax where applicable
- Platform
- macOS
- Requires
- macOS 26.4 or later
- Released
- September 2024
- Privacy
- No personal data collected
- Updated
- September 2026
- Version
- 1.30.1
- Size
- 16 MB
- Gumroad rating
- 5.0/5 (284 ratings)
Without an app
- Open “System Settings › Desktop & Dock”.
- Next to “Show items”, turn off “On Desktop”.
To show the icons again, turn it on. The files stay in the Desktop folder, so you can still open them in Finder.
To hide them everywhere, also in Mission Control, run this in the Terminal app. It restarts Finder:
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop false; killall Finder
To show them again, run it with true. The built-in setting is good when you hide the icons for a long time. Supercharge is faster when you hide them often, like for each screen share.