Clean Up Command
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Found on the Special menu on the Desktop, the Clean Up command is designed to help keep icons in windows organized by straightening them out visually. Each window has an invisible alignment grid. As you move files and folders around within a window, after a while they can become disorderly looking and scattered since they're not aligned with each other. The Clean Up command takes these scattered icons and snaps them to the invisible grid, straightening them into orderly rows. This particular command is available only when the window's view option is set to View by Icon or View by Small Icon. If you want to clean up just a few items, select only them items you want cleaned up and choose Clean Up from the Special menu. The Clean Up command also has a number of different forms it can take to help you with your housekeeping. If you select Clean Up while holding down the Option key, you'll notice that Clean Up Window has changed to Clean Up by Name, which not only aligns your icons into neat columns along an invisible grid, but it also arranges them alphabetically as well. You can also use the Clean Up command when no windows are open to help you straighten out your desktop. If you look under the Special menu when no windows are open, you'll see that the Clean Up command has again taken a different form and is now called Clean Up Desktop which snaps any items on the desktop to the invisible alignment grid on the desktop. If you were to hold the Option key while choosing Clean Up Desktop, it changes to the Clean Up All form, and this time it Cleans Up by aligning all your icons on the far right edge of your desktop. To clean up the icons in the active window, follow these steps: 1. Choose the Clean Up command from the Special menu (This works only when your windows view is set to View by Icon or View by Small Icon.) 2. The icons in the windows snap to an invisible alignment grid in the window. You can choose to align them on a straight grid where the icons are side-by-side, or a staggered grid that staggers the icons between lines. (The staggered method works great if you have long file names that might bump into one another on a straight grid.) You select which style of grid, straight or staggered, in the Views Control Panel, found under the Apple menu. 3. If you want these icons arranged alphabetically by name, hold the Option key as you choose Clean Up from the Special menu. 4. If you want to clean up the icons on your desktop, close all windows and choose Clean Up Desktop from the Special menu. 5. If you want to align all the icons on your desktop along the right edge of your desktop, hold the Option key as your choose Clean Up All from the Special menu.
See Also
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