On Windows 7, and above you can easily hide/unhide your desktop icons. To do it, just right-click anywhere on your desktop. Go to View>Show desktop icons, and unselect the option there. Your desktop icons will disappear leaving just a clean background. Anybody with a messy desktop can actually value this feature. If you frequently want to take screenshots, this guarantees you have a clean background for you to frame your windows. A couple of years back, there was a popular free app called Fences. It was a desktop management app which, in addition to other things, let you double-click to hide/unhide desktop your icons. Fences have since gone paid. If you really missed this particular feature from the app, you require an alternative.
ShowHide is a free little utility that will allow you to double-click to hide/unhide desktop icons. It keeps running in the system tray and does its one trick pretty well.
ShowHide works with your mouse’s selection button more often with the left-click button however, it additionally has a keyboard shortcut. The Alt+H keyboard shortcut allows you to hide/unhide desktop icons.
You can set the app to start when you boot windows. You can likewise hide/unhide desktop icons from the app’s system tray icon.
The good thing about ShowHide is that gives you each possible way to show or hide your desktop icons. Realistically, hiding or unhiding icons from the app’s system tray icon isn’t precisely convenient. It’s far less easy to utilize the default option in Windows all the right-click setting context. In any case, the alternative is awesome if you would prefer not to go to your desktop first and then show or unhide the icons.
Fences is still a pretty cool app and there aren’t any other apps that mimic its features however it’s not worth the purchase for such a little feature. Users acquainted with AutoHotkey scripts were, however, able to compensate for the feature with a straightforward script. If you aren’t comfortable enough with AutoHotkey scripts though, ShowHide is the least complex solution out there for you.
Hiding desktop icons may appear like an odd, even small feature though it’s very useful. To say, it’s useful enough that Microsoft included it as a staple feature in their OS. And even if you don’t take screenshots and keep well-organized desktop this feature can enable you to focus on your work better enough. It doesn’t help if you have to take look at files that require your attention each time you go to your desktop.
In case you’re a Mac user, something similar like this doesn’t exist in the OS out of the box but still, you can use a Terminal command to hide/unhide desktop icons in macOS. Though It is not the easiest or most convenient method but rather it is a free alternative for it.
