Clean Up Your Desktop the Quicksilver Way

On any given day, my desktop is filled with screenshots and images I’ve saved while writing tips. Often my desktop looks like the following:

Picture 53.png

There are a couple of methods to get around saving images to the desktop–including saving them to the clipboard–but I actually really like this method.

I have my bottom right corner of my screen set to show the desktop, so while writing a post I mouse over–grab whichever image I need and jump back into Ecto. The whole process takes about 2 seconds–it makes me extremely productive while writing tips.

But when things get cluttered, I spend extra time searching for an image. Not to mention it looks ugly having so many icons on the desktop.

This is where a quick bash script paired with Quicksilver comes to the rescue.

Note: This will overwrite any old files inside ~/Documents/Backup.

#!/bin/bash

mkdir ~/Documents/Backup mv ~/Desktop/* ~/Documents/Backup

This creates a directory inside your Documents folder named Backup and moves all the files from your desktop to that folder. I’m sure there’s some error checking that could help this script, but I wanted to keep this as simple as possible.

Save this script somewhere you can access it like your home directory called clean-desktop.sh.

Launch quicksilver and type the name of your script. You may have to press Command+R to rescan your catalog.

Picture 1.png