Desktop problem: Icons are not visible at all, yet appear in finder

Go to Mission Control, which will show a representation of your screen and windows, where you may find out that you have more than one desktop screen. Perhaps another screen has your usual desktop icons?

More about Mission Control: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4689

Open your Home folder.
One of the folders will be your Desktop folder, which will hold anything that you should see on your Desktop, including folders and app and other files. There will be some icons that may show on your desktop, which will NOT appear in your Desktop folder, such as icons for external drives, DVDs, and connected servers.

Check in your Finder Preferences, General tab. Do you have items checked that you need to show on your desktop (again, those would be storage devices, or servers, etc. ?)

Also try this: on your desktop screen hold/press CMD + Option + 1. this should alphabetize/arrange your icons. See if they show up when you do that

YawkYawkYawk said:

As the title states, I have been using Mavericks for well over a month now with no problems (Imac 2011 27"). However, I turn on my computer today and all of my icons on my desktop have disappeared. I can create new files and have them show up, however I cannot find a way to have the old ones visible. I have updated Mavericks, I have restarted the computer, re-logged in several times. No luck.

My desktop appears to be normal through finder, yet nothing is showing up on my actual desktop.

Any help?

Click to expand...

Hi,

Really late but still this could help people in the future.
Some people tend to run "dotfiles" to configure and set up their new Mac. Wel that is great because it is easy but when using the configuration from others like Paul Irish or Mathias Bynens, which are just super btw, a file called .osx runs and configures al lot of settings like desktop icons.

To show the icons:
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true
To hide the icons:
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false

Regards!