how to make mac desktop icons snap to grid

It's annoying because the misaligned icons are not visibly off the grid, so if I drag an icon, and then it jumps across the screen, I have to right-click, select 'Clean Up', then drag the icon where I wanted it. Still an annoying bug but at least there is a workaround. This used to work somewhere in recent operating system versions the Finder lost the capability to simply snap icons to the grid when I drag them there. So why do some icons become misaligned? Also, this does not explain why I cannot drag the icons to empty grid positions just because nearby icons are a few pixels off. I have always had the grid turned on so they should always snap to the grid. This more-or-less solves the problem, in that I can put the icons where I want, but it does not explain why the icons became misaligned in the first place, and does not explain why the icons do not just snap to the grid when I release the mouse button. So after the 'Clean Up' I can drag the icon to where I want. Even if they are too dumb to fix that minor problem, it still would be better than what the newer Finder versions do.ĭoing this aligns all of the icons on the desktop, and then the 'holes' become usable. Possibly they could look at the Mac OS 10.4 Finder code and just fix the small offset problem. The icon then snaps to the correct grid position, a little above and to the left of where you dragged it to. Dragging icons a little to the right and below the grid position always works in Mac OS 10.4.

They forgot to account for the icon's origin, which apparently is not in the exact center of the icon.

My PowerMac, running Mac OS 10.4, has a slight problem with dragging icons to grid positions, but it is merely an error in the icon's centering/origin. Also I don't remember this happening with the early versions of Mac OS X. They can probably find the fix by looking at the code for the Mac OS 9 Finder, which never had any such problem. I have been in the software business for more than 40 years, and so I never get tired of pointing out bugs. Apple just needs to fix the Finder and stop giving irrelevant 'fixes' just to keep me busy until I get tired of complaining. This problem has been there since I first turned on the brand-new computer, with only Apple software installed. Rebooting into safe mode is pointless and is not relevant to this kind of problem.

How to make mac desktop icons snap to grid