Get rid of “Steam Content” from Documents in Mac OS X

Steam brought a bad habit from Windows to Mac OS X — placing program related files into user’s documents folder. The folder is called “Steam Content” and it appeared in “Documents” right after I installed Steam onto my Mac yesterday.

However, you can easily hide or move it.

Hide it

Launch Terminal.app and paste the following into there:

setfile -a V ~/Documents/Steam\ Content

The folder should disappear immediately. To make it visible again, use:

setfile -a v ~/Documents/Steam\ Content

To view it in Finder while it is invisible, use:

open ~/Documents/Steam\ Content

Move it

Alternatively, you can move it to another place (be that another folder or even another partition). After moving you would have to create a symlink (sort of a shortcut in Windows’ terms).

For example, you can move it to user’s Library folder (the first line moves it, the second line creates a symlink and the third line hides the symlink in Finder):

mv ~/Documents/Steam\ Content ~/Library/Steam\ Content
ln -s ~/Library/Steam\ Content ~/Documents/Steam\ Content
setfile -P -a V ~/Documents/Steam\ Content

It’s not necessary to move using the Terminal.app — you can as well just take and drag in Finder to wherever you want. In this case, disregard the mv ... command and use only:

ln -s NEW_LOCATION_OF_STEAM_CONTENT ~/Documents/Steam\ Content
setfile -P -a V ~/Documents/Steam\ Content

If you don’t know the exact new path, just drag and drop Steam Content (while it’s in the new location) to the Terminal.app window.