Comments on: OS too pretty... Must purge all ui blemishes.

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

Popular Ethics — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:47:03 -0800

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.

By: luriete

luriete — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:51:08 -0800

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.

By: Uncle Glendinning

Uncle Glendinning — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:55:34 -0800

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.

By: ParisParamus

ParisParamus — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:58:13 -0800

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....

By: dobbs

dobbs — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 21:00:59 -0800

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.

By: dobbs

dobbs — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 21:04:54 -0800

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.

By: bcwinters

bcwinters — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 21:10:56 -0800

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.

By: Popular Ethics

Popular Ethics — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 21:21:22 -0800

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.

By: aladfar

aladfar — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 22:40:44 -0800

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.

By: wackybrit

wackybrit — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 03:51:45 -0800

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..?

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 12:16:35 -0800

Are you opposed to hiding your dock? I have mine pinned to the right side and set to hide. Works fine for me.

By: five fresh fish

five fresh fish — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 12:58:23 -0800

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.

By: Popular Ethics

Popular Ethics — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 14:30:42 -0800

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*.