My quest for the perfect Ubuntu desktop continues.
Today, I really wanted to remove all of my desktop icons since I like using that area for storage, but I don’t like having all that stuff strewn across each of my workspaces since I never actually use the desktop itself. I searched around and found some helpful information, but it really didn’t do what I wanted. I’ll provide that information in case it does what you want.
The Configuration Editor is Ubuntu’s (more acurately, Gnome’s) application that lets you control a massive number of options that all work together to present your desktop, file browser, windowing system, etc. You can add and remove system generated icons from the desktop by using the Configuration Editor (from now on referred to as Gconf. To load Gconf press “Alt+F2” to bring up the Run Application dialog, type in gconf-editor, and click Run.
Once Gconf is loaded, expand apps > nautilus > desktop. Once you’ve selected desktop, you’ll notice some options on the right-hand side. The options with checkboxes are of interest here. Checking or unchecking these checkboxes shows or hides the relevant desktop icons. You can show and hide desktop icons for computer, home, network, trash, and mounted volumes.
This is all well and good, but I wanted to be able to hide all the desktop icons, not just system created ones. So my search continues until I found From MacOS to Ubuntu: Show/Hide Desktop Icons on Gnome. Apparently there isn’t a way to just hide the icons, even by going through Gconf. So, you have to directly tell Gnome (the default window manager for Ubuntu) to not show any of them. So, the script provided will tell Gnome to toggle the display of all desktop icons. Sébastien even provides a nice icon to use in your dock for this function.
If you’ve tried the script, you may have noticed that it doesn’t work. The script is written to use the tcsh shell, which is not installed by default in Ubuntu. I quickly installed it by running the following in the terminal:
sudo apt-get install tcsh
After all this effort to find a way to remove the icons, I’ve decided to go ahead and not do so. After a couple of hours, I realized that my desktop was completely black. This is odd even though my background color is set to black since my desktop is also set to be transparent. After removing the modification and restarting X (Ctrl+Alt+Backspace), my desktop returned to normal. I’m going to go ahead and post this though as some may find this to be a benefit and don’t use the desktop transparency.
Until I find a solution, I guess that I will just have to keep my desktop clean. I guess bad habits are hard to break and Gnome won’t let me easily hide away my clutter.
Did I help you?
heyy
well, i kinda achieved whaat u want, only i want to get rid of it
if u see my desktop, u see no icons, but if i hover my mouse pointer over it for a bit, the icons become visible for a couple of seconds, and then back to being hidden unless i place the cursor over them again.
i want my icons back to normal again, any idea how???
Without knowing exactly what you’ve changed, I’m afraid that I really don’t know. I haven’t seen anything that claims to be able to do that. Can you give me more information about what you changed or point me to some sites where you got info on what to change?
Hi
I too have the habit of allowing my desktop to get very cluttered. I was looking for a way to show/hide all the clutter. After reading your post, I decided not to bother looking any further.
What I have done instead is create a folder ~/desktop-hidden, a bash script called cleanDesktop in /usr/bin which at the moment just contains mv ~/Desktop/* ~/desktop-hidden/ Then I added a launcher for cleanDesktop.
Its not exactly what I wanted, i’m sure there will be problems with identical filenames and such likes, but it is quick and easy 🙂
I’m sorry that I couldn’t offer a better solution Richard. Now, I just don’t use the Desktop that often. I created a Downloads folder and told Firefox to use that location by default, so that helps keep some of the clutter down.
To hide everything from the desktop (ALL icons):
run gconf-editor, then select apps > nautilus > preferences, and then you uncheck the “show_desktop” option.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the tip greg. I should have mentioned this when I posted as I did actually try this. The reason that I did not stick with the solution is that it messes up transparency on the desktop if your using Compiz.
If you aren’t using Compiz or don’t have a transparent desktop background, then this works very well. For some reason, if you do have a transparent background, it prevents the transparency from working.
A script which puts all the files on the desktop into a list in a hidden file called .hidden on the desktop will hide all the icons (except the volumes,trash etc). Unfortunately you must refresh the desktop to see the difference.
e.g.
#!/bin/bash
#Script to hide icons
ls ~/Desktop > ~/Desktop/.hidden
#!/bin/bash
#Script to show icons
rm ~/Desktop/.hidden
Interesting solution Pete. It’s not exactly my cup of tea, but I’m sure that some readers will like it.
[…] of simplicity” I have to use the godawful gconf tool, figure out which setting to […]
You can disable desktop rendering from with gconf-editor. apps > nautilus > prefrences and then uncheck the option “show desktop.” That should do the trick.