Starting tonight I am dumping the Downloads folder. It wasn’t always in my life. Apple added the Downloads folder to every user’s Home directory in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard as a default method of keeping the desktop clean and to showoff a new feature, stacked icons in the Dock. Now that the Downloads folder is out of my house, and off of my Dock, I am free to litter my Desktop with all of the interesting tidbits I take from the internet. I no longer have to delve into the filesystem to find what I have downloaded. There is no directory secretly caching my internet activity in an out of the way corner of my Home folder. What I am working on is spread out before me, and I fully accept the responsibility of clearing off my desktop each night before I go to bed.

You can eliminate your Downloads folder too. Just retrieve anything worth saving from its confines and enter the terminal command sudo rm -R ~/Downloads. You will be prompted for your administer password. Once your Downloads folder is gone it is important you set your browser to save downloaded files to your Desktop, otherwise the the restrictive capacities of the Downloads folder will return like a bad penny.

The Downloads folder is the default destination for saving files from the web in Mac OS X, but it doesn’t have to be that way. With a little gumption and a few quick keys presses in the command line you can reclaim control of your downloading destiny and keep your working files on the Desktop where they belong.