About Desk Rug
A little utility for messy desktops
Why Desk Rug Exists
Every Mac desktop eventually becomes a graveyard of screenshots, downloads, and half-finished projects. The icons pile up, the wallpaper disappears, and finding anything becomes impossible.
Desk Rug solves this with a simple metaphor: sweep everything under a rug. One hotkey hides the mess, another brings it back exactly where it was. No file ever moves, no folder gets reorganized — the desktop just gets a moment of peace.
How It Works
Desk Rug is a native macOS application written in Swift with Metal for rendering. It lives in your menu bar and stays out of the Dock.
When you press the hotkey (Control-Option-Command-R), the rug appears with real cloth physics simulation. Drag it around, and it folds and wrinkles like actual fabric. Sweep icons under it, and they disappear from view while their positions are remembered exactly.
The simulation runs entirely on your Mac's GPU. There's no cloud component, no server, no account required.
Features
- Real cloth physics simulation using Metal GPU acceleration
- Nine built-in rug patterns, plus the ability to import your own
- Fourteen floor backgrounds to match your setup
- Global hotkey to sweep and spread icons from anywhere
- Optional scheduling to auto-hide icons at specific times
- Launch at login support
- Universal binary for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs
The Author
