Script to hide desktop icons and Dock when creating OS X screenshots

When creating screenshots for the latest version of Textastic for Mac in OS X Yosemite, I needed a way to quickly hide the Dock and all desktop icons without using a separate demo account on my Mac.

This is the resulting shell script toggle_presentation_desktop.command:

#!/bin/bash

if [[ $(defaults read com.apple.finder CreateDesktop) = 1 ]]
then
	echo "enabling presentation mode"
	defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false
	osascript -e "tell application \"System Events\" to set the autohide of the dock preferences to true"
	killall Finder
else
	echo "disabling presentation mode"
	defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true
	osascript -e "tell application \"System Events\" to set the autohide of the dock preferences to false"
	killall Finder
fi

Make the script executable:

chmod +x toggle_presentation_desktop.command

Setting the “CreateDesktop” default to false hides the desktop icons, but still displays the wallpaper. The script uses AppleScript to hide the Dock.

Now I can just use Spotlight to execute the toggle_presentation_desktop.command shell script and it will toggle the Dock and desktop icons.

I also used Bartender to hide all menu bar icons except Spotlight and Notification Center.

This is one of the resulting screenshots: