MAC TREAT #209: Icon Management
Has your desktop ever become so cluttered that you had to condense things into folders or even worse — delete things? Well, this Mac Treat could potentially help solve your problem by shrinking the size of the text and icons littered about your desktop.
To start, we need to open the view options. Do this by selecting View > Show View Options while on your desktop. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut command+J. Make sure your menu bar says Finder and you are on the desktop, not a Finder window or some other application because you won’t be looking at the same view options (if any at all).
With the View Options showing, you can now use the slider for Icon Size to adjust how big or small you would like your icons to be. Directly below that is a slider to change the spacing between the icons. Finally, below that is a dropdown menu for the text size of the icon label.
If you’d like the smallest amount of screen real-estate taken up by your icons, I would suggest dropping the sliders all the way down and setting the text size to 10. Just be prepared to bust out your eagle eye vision because these things can get tiny.
If you are curious how I run my desktop, my current settings are:
- Icon Size: 32×32
- Grid Spacing: 4th tick
- Text Size: 10
- Label Position: Right
Play around with each of these settings to make the most of your desktop. Have fun with this and try out different combinations. Unfortunately, I cannot find a “restore to default setting” in OS X Lion (10.7). I recommend taking note of the settings before changing them just in case you want to change them back.