Keep Your Desktop Pristine with Hazel
There have always been aspects of excessive-compulsive behavior that I have found attractive. Of course, not the debilitating and very serious personal effects of the disease - effects that invariably have a negative impact on life - but rather its ability to force people to strive for perfection. Now, I’m not an obsessive-compulsive person entirely, but I do like to keep my virtual workspace organized. Until now, I kept my desktop free of downloaded files, images, text documents, Automator actions, etc. by manually dragging them into preset folders. This certainly got the job done, but it was both time and labor intensive, and often I couldn’t be bothered to complete the task. Being the AppleScript fan that I am, I attempted to write a script that would accomplish all of these tasks for me. It almost worked, but keeping a script up-to-date as well as adding new actions was a cumbersome process. It was the classic catch-22: the automated solution took longer and was much more work overall than the manual process it was designed to automate…
I’m happy to say that I found the perfect solution to my problem. Billed as a maid for your Macintosh and complete with a feather duster icon, Hazel by Noodlesoft automates entirely the business of keeping your Mac pristinely organized, doing what my AppleScript did and far more. Here’s how I’ve set it up.
First, create a folder called My Desktop and store it in your home folder or documents folder or wherever you want. Next, create a subfolder structure within My Desktop that reflects the file types which tend to end up on your desktop.
Now, open Hazel and set up your rules. First, select desktop by clicking the plus button at the bottom of the first pane. Now choose “No” when it asks you to load your new action with predefined rules. Instead, click the plus button at the bottom of the second pane. You can also set a result to display Growl notifications each time it acts on one of your folders. This gives you a visual queue when Hazel has done something. Perfect.
The main reason for dragging items to the desktop, however, is the ability to access them quickly, and it is here that the coup de grâce of my efforts lies. Drag your new My Desktop folder to the dock. Right click on the folder and set it to display as a list rather than a stack. Now you have complete access to all your desktop files from the dock and, if you’ve set it up correctly, you’ll never see another file on your desktop again.
Hazel is shareware and costs $22. It comes with a two week trial period. I suggest you download it and get all the results of obsessive-compulsive behavior without the neurosis itself.
