Hide the Text Below Desktop Icons

Some icons you use so regularly that you don’t need that annoying text below the icon. A good example of this is Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. We all know what those icons look like. To remove that text, just follow these instructions.

Right-click on the shortcut icon, and choose Rename. Now hold down the Alt key and type in 255 on the keypad to the right of the keyboard. You can’t use the number keys right above the keyboard. If you have a laptop, you can turn on Numlock and then use the little number keys next to the regular letters.

The way this works is that the Alt+255 character is blank, so the shortcut filename is actually just named with a character that is completely blank. For the first shortcut on the desktop, you would use Alt+255, but for the next shortcut, you’ll have to enter the combination twice (Alt+255, Alt+255). For the third, three times… and so on. This is because you can’t name two different shortcuts or files the same thing. Entering Alt+225 twice would give you two blanks instead of one.

Now we have a beautiful icon, with no text underneath it!