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Most will know how to show or hide network shares on your Mac desktop. Click a Finder window, select the "Finder" - "Settings" menu and under the "General" tab either check "Connected servers" to show share icons on your desktop, or uncheck this option to not show these icons. Downside: this affects all mounted share icons.
Advanced options in Path Finder
Applications like Path Finder have a more advanced "Get Info" option, so when selecting the actual mount path of a share, you can right click that directory and check or uncheck the "invisible" option. But of course, not everybody has a copy of Path Finder (commercial app).
Terminal trick ...
Now there is a trick to do this in Terminal - which may not work in old(er) macOS versions, but so far it seems to work in Monterey, Ventura and Sonoma.
Let's say we have a share mounted in /Volumes/AllShares and the Finder option enable to show "Connected Servers" on the Desktop. This will make it that we will see an "AllShares" icon on the desktop.
List Extended attributes
When hiding the share icon from the Desktop, I did see that the extended attribute "comp.apple.FinderInfo" of the original directory (/Volumes/AllShares) was given a specific value (note that this value can hold other otpions as well, like the flag colors for example):
Of course the rick now ... how do we add this "weird" value as an extended attribute?
Manually set the Share icon on the Desktop to hidden
To make a specific share icon hidden (killall Finder to make it visible, and note that color tag will be unset after this):
xattr -wx com.apple.FinderInfo "0000000000000000400000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000" /Volumes/AllShares
killall Finder
Unhide mounted share icon from Desktop
To unhide this particular icon we will need to remove the extended attribute "com.apple.FinderInfo" from the original directory (/Volumes/AllShares). In Terminal ( "-d" = delete, and again: note that color tag will be unset after this ) :
xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo /Volumes/AllShares
To make this visible we will need to restart Finder like so (in Terminal):
killall Finder
Took me quite a bit of time to figure this out ,... so I hope it will be useful to someone.
ForkLift Great tool for FTP, SFTP, remote editing of text files (through SSH) and even a great Finder replacement - Not free, but keep an eye on special offerings (I got my copy for $5)
IINA VideoPlayer One of the best media players for MacOS X - it's free and a great alternative for, and more stable than, VLC.
VueScan Ultimate scanning tool for Windows, Linux, and macOS, supporting pretty much any scanner, even those no longer supported by your OS. (no scanner drivers needed!)
Kubuntu Kubuntu is a Ubuntu variant that use KDE as it's desktop manager. Fast and well supported.
Links Page These and more of our favorite links can be found on the Links Page.
New Downloads
ConnectMeNow4-v4.0.18-macOS-x86-64.dmgDate: 2024-04-24 - Size: 3.5 MBVersion 4 of ConnectMeNow - A tool for more convenient mounting of network shares under macOS. This is the Intel version which works on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.
ConnectMeNow4-v4.0.18-macOS-arm64.dmgDate: 2024-04-24 - Size: 3 MBVersion 4 of ConnectMeNow - A tool for more convenient mounting of network shares under macOS. This is the Apple Silicon version (not suitable for Intel).
MiniWOL2 MacOS (64 bits Apple Silicon)Date: 2023-08-01 - Size: 1.2 MBminiWol is a simple, but effective application to send Wake On LAN to network devices. This is the signed 64 bit MacOS ARM (Apple Silicon) version.
MovieScanner2-2.2.3-Windows-32bit-setup.exeDate: 2023-04-12 - Size: 18.6 MBA small application that uses FFProbe to scan your video files and logs these details in a small database. This is the 32 bit Windows version.
MovieScanner2-2.2.2-Linux-GTK-64bits.tar.gzDate: 2023-04-11 - Size: 29.2 MBA small application that uses FFProbe to scan your video files and logs these details in a small database. This is the 64 bit Linux version for GTK.
MovieScanner2-2.2.2-Linux-QT5-64bits.tar.gzDate: 2023-04-11 - Size: 29.1 MBA small application that uses FFProbe to scan your video files and logs these details in a small database. This is the 64 bit Linux version for QT5.
Downloads Page Find these and more Downloads on the Downloads Page, where you will also find articles references, operating system requirements and categories.
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