How to hide desktop icons on a Mac, with a setting or one command

How do I hide desktop icons on a Mac?

Open System Settings, Desktop & Dock, and in the Desktop & Stage Manager section, next to Show items, untick On Desktop. Every icon leaves the desktop at once. Nothing is deleted: the files are still in the Desktop folder in Finder.

How do I hide desktop icons with Terminal?

This turns the desktop off in Finder, which hides files and drives alike:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop false; killall Finder

To show them again, run the same with true. Finder restarts, which closes its windows but nothing else.

How do I hide only the drives on my desktop?

In Finder, choose Finder, Settings, General, and untick the kinds under Show these items on the desktop: hard disks, external disks, CDs and iPods, connected servers. On our Mac, external disks were shown and the internal disk was not, which is how macOS ships.

How do I remove an icon from the desktop without deleting it?

Move the file into another folder, such as Documents. If the icon is an alias (it has a small arrow), dragging it to the Trash removes only the alias, never the original.

Icons gone and you did not hide them? See desktop icons disappeared.

Checked on 16 October 2026 on a MacBook Air (M1) running macOS 27.0.1, by reading its settings and the labels in System Settings. Nothing was changed. CreateDesktop was not set (icons shown) on this Mac.