Lee Byron

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.

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.