Reclaim your ownership of ~/Documents
I’m a Mac user for quite a while now. Naturally when I came to the Mac and saw the quite logical organization in the home folder where everything was divided in movies, pictures, and documents it seemed like a really good idea to use these. Unfortunately Documents is used by all sorts of apps to store their data. I wanted to have my Documents folder back!
This MetaFilter thread suggests to use SetFile – included in the previous Apple Developer Tools – to hide folders.
Since Lion, however, we can actually use something way more easy: chflags
You may recall this command from "unhiding the Library folder".
What this tool essentially does, is it allows you to change certain flags, like the hidden flag, without altering the name of files or folders. (Unlike the traditional way where you had to add a “.” to the name.
The difference with chflags is that apps which insist on using ~/Documents will still be able to use this folder, but you, the user, won’t see them.
Example: To hide VVVVVV’s game settings located in ~/Documents/VVVVVV open a Terminal and type:
chflags hidden ~/Documents/VVVVVV
Good luck everyone.