OS too pretty... Must purge all ui blemishes.

October 23, 2005 8:47 PM

OS X desktop icons: how can I shift the grid so that my hard drive icon doesn't sit half under my right-side-pinned dock?

I like to keep my dock on the right side, but that means the hard drive icon is partially obscured. I can move all my icons manually, of course, but any files I copy to the desktop from Safari or Finder get put back under my dock auto-annoyingly. Is there a plist setting or other obscure trick which could fix this? My usual source, macosxhints, has no answers.

posted by Popular Ethics to computers & internet (12 comments total)

I don't think there's a way to do this - however, you can put an alias of your desktop into the dock, so that way you can access everything via the dock and you won't care if stuff gets stuck under it.
posted by luriete at 8:51 PM on October 23, 2005

Did you try making the dock smaller? If I put mine on the right, it's small enough that the right-most icons on the desktop are still to the left of the dock.
posted by Uncle Glendinning at 8:55 PM on October 23, 2005

My Dock is on the right side, but the HD Icon is not touching it. I've never had the problem you describe, so I'm puzzled. On the other hand, may I ask, how can I put a folder alias in the dock? It doesn't "go in" when I try....
posted by ParisParamus at 8:58 PM on October 23, 2005

PP, you can put any folder on your dock, it just has to be on the "right" side of the line--the side the trash is on. Just make an alias of your desktop folder and drag it there.
posted by dobbs at 9:00 PM on October 23, 2005

Actually, you don't even have to make an alias. Just go into hard drive > users > username and drag the desktop icon from there to the right (or bottom if your dock is on the side of your screen) side of the dock.
posted by dobbs at 9:04 PM on October 23, 2005

You could pin your dock to the bottom-right corner using TinkerTool or a similar utility, so that it "grows" upwards from the bottom instead of from the center, which would keep it further away from your hard drive icon.

You could also hit Apple-J when only the desktop is visible and set the label position to Right instead of Bottom, which will shift the icon grid over leftwards quite a bit.
posted by bcwinters at 9:10 PM on October 23, 2005

I might have mischaracterized the problem. The icons on the right are not inaccessible. It just looks terrible when the dock icons overlap them. So while shrinking the dock, or putting in a desktop shortcut are workarounds, they don't address my (admittedly trivial) issue.

PP: You're right, the dock only reaches the hard drive when I have a lot of minimized windows. New files line up under the hard drive, however, and are often obscured.
posted by Popular Ethics at 9:21 PM on October 23, 2005

Onyx is a free utility that will, among other things, allow you to anchor the dock at the bottom right - this should solve your problem (unless you minimize a lot of windows, etc).

I'd suggest moving your dock to the left, but I suspect you're as adamant about having it on the right as I am devoted to the left, so that's probably out.

Perhaps you could change some of your habits instead. Rather than minimize windows, I option-click the desktop to hide the frontmost application. This makes all Safari windows, for example, disappear until I return back to it. So it's rare for me to have minimized windows in the dock.

This habit has been with me since at least the days of OS 8. I can't imagine working on a Mac without it.
posted by aladfar at 10:40 PM on October 23, 2005

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I seem to recall I used to move all my OS X icons to the left and then everything would naturally stick to the left..?
posted by wackybrit at 3:51 AM on October 24, 2005

Are you opposed to hiding your dock? I have mine pinned to the right side and set to hide. Works fine for me.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:16 PM on October 24, 2005

I moved my right-most column of icons to the far left. My 12" iBook positioned the icons half off the screen. And when I used View>Clean-up and View>Arrange By commands, the icons were all put back on the right.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:58 PM on October 24, 2005

Thanks for all the workarounds, but it seems there's no way to just shift the icon grid. I'll survive I guess *overdramatic sigh*.
posted by Popular Ethics at 2:30 PM on October 24, 2005