Horizontal Icon Spacing

Hi pldehoff, and a warm welcome to the forum! 🙂

I'm on Leo at the moment, but as I recall...

Select a Desktop Icon the Select All, then choose View Options, adjust the size slider, choose snap to Grid and maybe arrage by...

PS, the fewer Icons you keep on the Desktop, the faster your Mac will be, they use way more resources there.

Performance tip: Keep the Desktop clutter-free (empty, if possible)

Mac OS X's Desktop is the de facto location for downloaded files, and for many users, in-progress works that will either be organized later or deleted altogether. The desktop can also be gluttonous, however, becoming a catch-all for files that linger indefinitely.

Unfortunately - aside from the effect of disarray it creates - keeping dozens or hundreds of files on the Desktop can significantly degrade performance. Not necessarily because the system is sluggish with regard to rendering the icons on the desktop and storing them in memory persistently (which may be true in some cases), but more likely because keeping an excessive number of items on the Desktop can cause the windowserver process to generate reams of logfiles, which obviously draws resources away from other system tasks. Each of your icons on your desktop is stored as a window in the window server, not as an alias. The more you have stored, the more strain it puts on the window server. Check your desktop for unnecessary icons and clear them out.

Keeping as few items as possible on the Desktop can prove a surprisingly effective performance boon. Even creating a single folder on your Desktop and placing all current and future clutter inside, then logging out and back in can provide an immediately noticeable speed boost, particularly for the Finder.

And it is why Apple invented 'Stacks' for Leopard.

How about answering the guys question.. I'm seeking the same answer..

No matter how the view settings are adjusted or icon size or text on top or side I can only get 4-5 columns. 4 with label on right..

Seems only way to get tighter is turn off keep arranged by.. at smallest icon size then can get 10 columns..

If I use view>arrange by> kind lets say, it goes back to wide pacing even if I can manually place icons in between.. so seems only way to reduce the space is turn off anything automatic...

seems like a poor solution.. I've tried a few programs out there to edit the icon placement, all did not fix this problem.

I distinctly remember being able to do this in older versions (although you might have needed ResEdit for some of them), so this is a giant step backwards, one that seems to have only been corrected in Leopard (and since I deliberately chose a "bionic desk lamp" iMac, and an old enough one to be built as a true 9/X dual-boot, I'd need some sort of "persuader" to take that option). You could also apply a stagger factor.

In Tiger, it appears that the point size of the text controls the horizontal spacing, and the icon size controls the vertical.

With my current screen resolution (1024 x 768), I find that I can get 6 columns of icons if the text size is 11pt or larger, or 7 if it's 10pt. I also get 6 rows with the icon size set in the 64-72 range, but if I go larger than 68, the bottom row gets overlaid by the Dock, obscuring the names and rendering the row more-or-less useless.

If anybody's got a better answer, I'd love to find out about it.

You're absolutely right about the font size for desktop icons. I had cranked mine up to 13 while I was using it on a flatscreen TV. I was having the same problem with the horizontal distance between icons. It seems like there may be a glitch in how the finder handles this, because the step between 12pt and 13pt is way out of whack. Dropping the font size to less than 13 fixed it on my machine.

I can't seem to find this at the moment, but I swear the spacing was editable at one time. I was thinking Tinkertool allowed this, but don't see it in the current version. Maybe TransparentDock? Just a thought.

[http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1922642] - icon spacing affected by specific font size settings

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/14458 - supposed to do icon spacing but receives poor reviews

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/12850/macpilot