Meeting Mode on Mac: get screen-share ready in one click

The five seconds before you share your screen are the worst five seconds of any meeting. Desktop covered in files with revealing names, a Dock full of what you were doing earlier, widgets showing your calendar. Meeting Mode handles all of it in a single click, and puts it back afterwards.

What Meeting Mode changes

Meeting Mode is a Recipe: one click applies eight separate macOS settings that between them clear the personal information off your screen. Individually every one of these is a setting you could change by hand in System Settings or Terminal. The point is that you do not have to remember all eight while a client waits in the lobby.

• Hide desktop icons — every file on the desktop disappears from view. They are still in ~/Desktop, just not on screen.
• Stop click-to-reveal desktop — a stray click on the wallpaper no longer sweeps all your windows aside mid-call.
• Hide desktop widgets — calendar, stocks and the rest come off the wallpaper.
• Hide the Stage Manager strip — the side column of window thumbnails stops advertising what else you have open.
• Auto-hide the Dock — the Dock stays out of the shared frame until you point at it.
• Hide recent apps in the Dock — the trailing section that shows what you were last using is removed.
• Skip the screenshot thumbnail — grabs save straight to disk instead of floating in the corner of your recording.
• New Finder windows open to Home — so an accidental Finder window shows your Home folder, not the client project you had open before this one.

None of these delete anything. They change what is visible, which is the part that matters when your screen is on someone else's monitor.

The one thing it cannot do

macOS does not let a third-party app turn on Do Not Disturb for you — Focus is controlled by the system and by you, not by other software. So set that yourself before you present. The quickest route is the Control Center menu bar icon, or set up a shortcut once and forget it: see the Do Not Disturb keyboard shortcut.

Any app claiming it flips Do Not Disturb on your behalf is either doing something fragile or something you would not want it doing. Mainspring tells you the truth about that boundary rather than pretending.

Doing it by hand instead

If you would rather not use a Recipe, here are the real commands behind the two biggest wins. Both take effect after the relevant app restarts.

# hide every icon on the desktop
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false; killall Finder

# put them back
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true; killall Finder

# auto-hide the Dock
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool true; killall Dock

# undo
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool false; killall Dock

The tedious part is not any single command. It is that a real pre-meeting pass is eight of them, and then eight more to undo, and you are doing it with someone waiting.

Getting back to normal

This is the half people forget. A meeting-ready Mac is a slightly annoying Mac to work on: your desktop files are invisible, the Dock keeps sliding away. Applying a Recipe in Mainspring is reversible in one action, so your working setup comes back the moment the call ends. Every individual toggle also has its own undo button if you decide you liked one of the changes and want to keep just that.

If you want the longer version of a permanently tidier setup rather than a temporary one, the decluttering guide covers the settings worth keeping on all the time.

Common questions

Does Meeting Mode delete my desktop files?

No. Hiding desktop icons changes only what is drawn on screen. Every file is still in your Home folder under Desktop, and you can reach them in Finder as usual.

Can it turn on Do Not Disturb for me?

No, and no third-party app can. macOS reserves Focus control for the system and the user, so set Do Not Disturb yourself from Control Center before you present.

Is it reversible?

Yes. Applying the Recipe is one action and undoing it is another, and each individual setting also has its own undo button if you want to keep some of the changes.

Will people see my notifications?

Only if you leave notifications on. Meeting Mode clears static clutter such as icons, widgets and the Dock; incoming banners are handled by Do Not Disturb, which you set yourself.

Does it work on older macOS versions?

The desktop, Dock and screenshot settings work on macOS 13 Ventura and later. The Stage Manager and desktop widget settings only apply where those features exist, on Ventura and Sonoma onwards respectively.

Before your next call

Two minutes of setup once: apply Meeting Mode, set a Do Not Disturb shortcut, and decide whether you share a window or the whole screen. After that the pre-call scramble is a single click. For the window-versus-screen decision, sharing one window instead of your whole screen is the safer default in most meetings.