10 Things You May Not Know You Can Do With Your Mac Desktop

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some things you may not know that you could do with your Mac Desktop.

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So the Desktop is a special folder on your Mac that not only works like a regular folder but also the items in it appear on your Desktop as icons. Many of us just leave a cluster of different files and the folders on the Desktop and it can get kind of messy. But there's a lot of different things you can do with your Desktop to make it easier to use. Let's start off with these icons here on the right. You may or may not see these. These are drives that are either in your Mac or external to your Mac. I've got two external drives and an internal drive here. Now you may like them being there on your Desktop but if you don't or you don't see them but you would like them to be there go to Finder Preferences and then go to General. You'll see Show these items on your Desktop. The items checked here will be shown. So if I don't want External Disk shown I can uncheck that and those go away. If I uncheck Hard Disk entirely then you'll see my internal drive goes away as well. You can also decide whether other types of drives attached to your Mac will show up and whether connected servers will show up here. I like to have all these off. You can easily access them in the Finder by either going to  Go, Computer and then I can see them all there or Go, Connect to Server, Command K, and then Browse to browse my network. 

When you're moving icons around you can put them anywhere you want. But it gets messy. If you'd rather them snap to a grid you can have them do that. Just go to View and then look under Sort By and there's an option there Snap to Grid. Nothing changes right away and now any time I move one of these it's going to snap into a grid position. So as I move things around they'll snap into this nice grid here. You can go to View and then Show View Options and this is where you set the grid size. So I can change it here like this and it will change the spacing between each one.

Now if you like the idea of having everything neatly in a grid you can always force them all into a grid by selecting them all like that and then go to View, and then Clean Up Selection. That will take every icon and move it to its nearest grid position. You could also use View, and then Clean Up By and then choose one of these things like By Name and it will rearrange everything starting at the top right and then going down in columns and moving over to the left. So in this case I clean them up by name so you can see they are all organized by Name or you can choose something else. Like, for instance, clean up by Kind or clean up by Date Modified. Now that's a one time thing. As I modify files here they are not going to rearrange. 

But if I go to View, and Sort By I can choose one of these options and it will keep things sorted by that criteria. So, for instance, I can use Date Last Opened and now everything is organized by Date Last Opened. So if I were to open this file here notice how it changed to move that one to the top right and push everything else down.

Now if you want these icons to look bigger or smaller you can also do that here in Show View Options. So you've got the ability to change the icon size and make it bigger which is useful especially if you've got lots of images here and you want to see previews of them or if you have lots of files and you want to fit more in there you can make them smaller. You can also change the Text Size. So instead of the default here I can make it much larger and easier to read or I can make it smaller to fit more text easily on one line. 

Another interesting option is to change the label position. Instead of at the bottom move it to the right. This gives everything a very different look without having all of the labels here to the right instead of below. It also gives more room to stack the icons vertically. 

There's also this interesting option here, Show Item Info. When you check that some items get more information. Like images get dimensions or videos get length. 

The ultimate way to organize the Desktop though is to  use Stacks. Go to View and use Stacks and turn that On. Now things are grouped together like all the documents here. You click and it expands all the documents. Click again and it shrinks them back into a single icon. Under View here now Sort changes to Group Stacks By and you can change the groupings so you can have them basically by the Last Opened. So you can see groups like Today, Previous 30 Days, different months, and different years. 

Now keep in mind that the Desktop folder is still just a regular folder even though it has this special property of showing everything here on the Desktop. Like this. So if you have a really cluttered Desktop and you want to start going through it it might be useful to use List View to go through it instead of Icon View. But you can't show List View here on the Desktop. So what you would do is create a new Finder window and then go to your Desktop and you can see right here at the same files that are there. This is just two different ways of looking at the same location. So change to List View and now you can easily Sort By things, see sizes very easily, and all of that. I try to keep my Desktop empty at all times. But if it did get cluttered an easy way to unclutter it would be to open it up in a window like this. Use List View and then go through it in this way. Every time I move something to say a different folder like Documents or combine things into subfolders I'll see the changes reflected here at the same time I make them here. It's just easier to go through them in a list.

There's one keyboard shortcut I want to share with you. If you go into System Preferences and then Keyboard and then Shortcuts notice under Mission Control there's a Show Desktop shortcut. In my case it is set to F11. Check for your Mac what it's set to and that it is turned On. So if I have another app open, like let's say I'm using Safari and maybe it's covering up the Desktop and I want to access a file, I just hit F11 and all of the windows I've opened move to the sides and I can see the files here and even act on them by double-clicking on this one to open.

You probably know how you can change the Desktop background, of course. You go into System Preferences and here you go to Desktop & Screen Saver. It will be slightly different. It will be called Wallpaper when we get to macOS Ventura. You can choose all of the different backgrounds. You can drag and drop your own images in here. But what a lot of people don't know is you can just go to Colors and not only choose one of these background colors, like say black here or gray, but you can also click Custom Color and choose any color that you want to be your Desktop background. 

I want to show you one more tip here that's really advanced. This is a third party tool. You can get it from this website. It's been around for a long time and I've used it in the past. You can now put things on your Desktop Background that appear to be permanent parts of the background but they can update. So, for instance, you can have system logs. You can have terminal scripts. You can have images or webpages as part of the background. So we go into Geek Tool here and I'm going to do an example. An image right here. I'll Drag and Drop it and I can position this anywhere I want on the Desktop. I'll put it right here and then I'll set it to an image. You can see it appears there. Now I'll Hide Geek Tool there and you can see it's just on my Desktop there. It's part of the background. So you can have several of these like pictures of your family or things that you like on your Desktop. You can do other things as well. I'm going to use a Shell Script here. Let me drag it over here and I'm just going to put this Shell Command, Date. Really simple. Now you see that date appears there. I can set it to refresh, say, every ten seconds. Now I've got this date printed up here on the Desktop. Of course, in that script I can customize date in lots of different ways. I can have the Shell Script that do all sorts of things. Put all sorts of information on my Desktop. You could do the same thing having a webpage on the Desktop. Maybe it's like a local weather webpage that you have appear at the bottom left hand corner and update every minute. There's a lot of cool advanced things that you can do if you really want to experiment using Geek Tool.

Hope you found all of this useful. Thanks for watching.