was the universal “stop it!” keystroke on the Mac.)Īfter you press that keyboard shortcut, all hidden files and directories appear, grayed out so you know they’re meant to be invisible, in all open Finder windows. (Bonus points to those who flinch slightly when typing it because your fingers remember when Command. The shortcut is easy to remember because the period is the character Unix uses to hide files and directories.
Wouldn’t it be helpful if you could just see these invisible files in a Finder window? You can! However, sometimes you don’t want to mess with Terminal, or it would just be easier if you could open one of these files in a text editor by dragging it to the app’s Dock icon. Most recently, and the event that was the impetus for this article, I needed to check to see if I had a public key in ~/.ssh.īecause macOS is based on Unix, you can open Terminal and list all the files in a directory, including the invisible ones, with ls -asl (only -a is necessary, but I always use -asl to get hidden files, file sizes, and a detailed listing). Maelstrom-data that must have been related to the game Maelstrom, a fun blast from the past. I currently have 61 files and directories that start with a period at the top level of my home directory, one dating as far back as 2008. Some Unix-level files and directories start with a period so they are hidden by default, and many apps create such items to hide support files from the user. This need goes beyond revealing the ~/Library folder, which we wrote about first in “ Dealing with Lion’s Hidden Library” (20 July 2011) and covered again in “ Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Shift Key” (7 April 2017).
#Finder show hidden files shortcut mac
Now and then, advanced Mac users need to work with files or folders that are normally invisible because their names start with a period.
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#Finder show hidden files shortcut pro
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