This is a handy little AppleScript that takes all the clutter on your desktop and packs it up neatly and out of the way. Run it again, and it’ll unpack you and put your mess back just the way you like it. Handy for presentations or before you have visitors.

Run this script, and all the files and folders on your desktop will be cleaned up and dropped into a “Desktop Items” folder. When you’re ready to get back to work, run the script again, and everything from the Desktop Items folder will get put back where it came from, as though they had never left.

And yes, you are free to keep working on files in the Desktop Items folder until you’re ready to unpack. If you add items to the desktop after de-cluttering it, you can just run the script again to pack those ones up, or you can unpack right on top of them. Totally up to you. The “Clean Up” command is handy here to avoid double-decker icons.

Disks and whatnot on your desktop are just tidied up by name, no big whoop.

A lot to say about a simple script. Run. Clean. Run. Messy.