Desktop Icons - hidden but active?

General Linux Question
,
1

Linux Mint 20 - cinnamon

I came across a cool set of industrial-looking wallpapers with valves, switches, and buttons. I would love to be able to place desktop icons on the different switches & valves but not be able to see them, so it looks like I’m activating the hidden shortcut by pressing one of the controls on the wallpaper.

Any suggestions on how to make this work?

2

I don’t know which desktop environment you are on but usually, you can change the image for any given desktop icon. Just take an image which is simply transparent:

transparent

It’s there, if you position your mouse over the empty space, you should get the option “download this image”.

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3

And here is how you change an icon (in KDE):

icon_kde

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4

Mina you’re too generous!! That’s a great tutorial.

I’ve edited some icons in GIMP and made them transparent.
Is there any way to hide the Text as well?

5

You didn’t have to edit the icons … you could have just stored the transparent image somewhere and assigned it to the icon as image, just as I showed.

When it comes to hide the labels, I don’t know. It surely can be done by tweaking the Plasma theme but I don’t know anything about that.

Another way is to change the icons’ names in /home/$USER/.local/share/plasma_icons/*AppName*.desktop

These files look like that:

[Desktop Entry]
...
Name=AppName

You can change the Name entry to \s which is the <SPACE> character. Just typing the space character or leaving the name blank won’t do the trick.

EDIT: I now see, you use Cinnamon, not KDE, so these tips are useless for you but surely there must be a similar configuration file.

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I have to say, I always liked the traditional UNIX approach where every aspect of your system’s configuration can be managed by editing human readable text files.

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7

Thanks Mina.

I ended up shrinking the ‘Icon Size’ to the smallest setting and that shrinked the text down to almost unnoticable level. I really like how it looks and it still leaves a subtle reminder as what the transparent icon are and location.

I appreciate you Mina.

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8

lol, but i have been doing this for sees like ages. nice tut

9

@geodude

Many thanks for the

remark, but this

is a sentence which I simply don’t understand. I’m sorry!
English is not my native language.

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so sorry Mina, my last remark is just saying i have been doing as you posted for a long time.
thanks again.