It’s easy to hide the Mac hard drive icons, but what about all the other stuff that gets dumped to your desktop? Well that’s easy to hide too actually, following these instructions:
Clean up the Desktop by Hiding Desktop Icons
Launch Terminal and type the following:
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false
After hitting enter, you’ll want to kill the Finder so that it relaunches and the changes take effect:
killall Finder
All of the files will still exist, but they’re now discretely hidden in your home folder’s “Desktop” directory rather than cluttering up your actual desktop.
To show the Desktop icons again, open the Mac Terminal and type the following:
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true
Again, kill the Finder and your icons will show on the desktop as usual.