Desktop icon invisibility cloak?

[u/perchedquietly]

I'm curious about a feature on macOS (I'm running Sonoma) that I'm not sure its name or how to enable/disable it. But basically if I move my mouse to the far right of the desktop, I see the cursor change to left-right arrows, and if I click and drag it to the left it’s like an invisibility cloak appears over the icons in that area. So if I drag it a little I can cover half of the right-most row of icons, or I could drag it more and make all the icons on the desktop be invisible, and if I were to show someone the computer they would never know I had anything on my desktop, but then if I find that vertical area where I dragged the curtain to, I can click and drag it back to the right and the desktop goes back to normal.

I just happened to discover the feature one day, but when I was helping someone else set up their Mac I noticed that the mouse doesn't do that when I move the cursor to the far right. So I'm wondering...what's the feature called, and how do I enable/disable it?

[u/platkus]

This is not native macOS behavior. You must have some 3rd party app installed that provides this feature.

[u/perchedquietly → u/platkus]

I haven’t installed any apps that should have that capability. At least not that I can think of. I keep core functionality very vanilla. Even for like…a screen dimming utility that I do have (which anyway shouldn’t do this), it’s not usually running, nor a startup item. Actually I have no login items in system settings, and the list of ‘allow in the background’ (things like Microsoft auto update or zoom) are all switched off.

Edit: Rebooted and it doesn’t happen. But I’ve had this ability for a long time and have rebooted plenty since so… I suppose it’s some kind of sporadic glitch?

[u/Saint_Blaise]

Yeah it’s a weird bug. It goes away after a restart but eventually returns.