Show Hidden Files in Mac Finder

By  on  

Setting up a new machine is a great time for me to write blog posts about configuration settings that I'd forgotten to document.  Much of the time I refer back to this post to figure out how I did things like Add Dock Separators and add support for Xbox controllers.

One important configuration detail developers like myself need is the ability to view hidden and dot files from within Finder:

Finder Hidden Files

To show hidden files within Finder, execute the following from the command line terminal:

# Always show hidden files
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

# Reset Finder for the settings to take effect
killall Dock

You'd think your machine was empty until you see the mountain of hidden files that macOS hides by default!  I understand why Apple hides these files by default:  they want the machine to seem simple for most users. Us developers, however, need to know where all the skeletons are!

Recent Features

  • By
    Introducing MooTools Templated

    One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...

  • By
    Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations

    Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    External Site Link Favorite Icons Using MooTools and CSS

    I recently came upon an interesting jQuery article about how you can retrieve all external links within a page, build the address of the site's favorite icon, and place the favorite icon along side the link. I've chosen a different approach which...

  • By
    JavaScript Canvas Image Conversion

    At last week's Mozilla WebDev Offsite, we all spent half of the last day hacking on our future Mozilla Marketplace app. One mobile app that recently got a lot of attention was Instagram, which sold to Facebook for the bat shit crazy price of one...

Discussion

  1. Cmd + Shift + .

    I found it much quicker. Have a great day!

  2. Easy to think about it. Cmd + Shift + dot (like a dotfiles — hidden files in mac OS)

  3. I’ve setup two aliases for this so it’s easy to toggle between the modes.

    alias showHiddenFiles='defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES; killall Finder'
    alias hideHiddenFiles='defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles NO; killall Finder'
  4. Ivan Čurić

    Or you can use ⌘+ ⇧ + .

  5. Tobsen

    There is an easier way to do this. Just press ⌘⇧. in the Finder or open/save dialog.

  6. Dave

    When did this come out??? ⌘+ ⇧ + .

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!