tilhow to remove the mac desktop

After nearly two decades on a Mac, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that the Desktop is actively harmful. It is the junk drawer of the Mac. It distracts me, it collects stuff, things get lost there, I’m done with it.

Here’s how to get rid of it.

Remove everything from the Desktop folder.
Make sure nothing is being automatically saved to the desktop. The most likely culprit is Screenshot.app.

Disable the Desktop folder from the desktop, and restart Finder

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop false
Killall Finder

Open Finder, right click Desktop in sidebar and “Remove from Sidebar”

You can’t actually delete the Desktop folder itself, because Finder will just recreate it upon finding it missing. You can instead render it useless by symlinking it back to your home directory¹.

rm -rf ~/Desktop
ln -s ~ ~/Desktop
sudo chflags -h schg ~/Desktop

This last step stops Finder from replacing the symlink with an empty directory.

As an aside, if you want to keep your Desktop but want to put it somewhere else (like within Dropbox), these same symlinking steps will achieve this, just change the linked location.
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