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Comment by hamiltont | Hacker News Reader

Show hidden files (dotfiles) inside any finder window or file open dialog: Cmd + Shift + .

Discovered after ~10 years

Why would they not put this in the View menu? I can even imagine someone invoking it by mistake and not working out how to undo it.

Exactly, it's also a needless pain point for those switching from Windows, where the checkbox is relatively accessible, if a few clicks away.

Not even temporarily, it’s a permanent, system-wide setting.

snap, I never realized it was permanent. Guess I just kept turning it off. Thanks! Updated parent comment

That’s wild. I’ll leave it off, though. I don’t trust Finder to handle file operations safely and effectively (too many dangling files, partial copies, and littered indexing files in my history).

If I have dot files, I’m gonna go all grey beard and handle them in a terminal.

This is one of the most useful ones here that I didn't already know, thank you

This is awesome.

I’ve been using `defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES; killall dock` for at least 15 years. A quick DDG search, indicated this shortcut arrived in High Sierra. Has it been around longer?

No, this new added recent years. Before that I have to use software like xtrafinder (Cmd+Shift+/)

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https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac-software/show-hidden-f... added since sierra

It has been around for as long as I can remember, and I have been using Mac since 10.3.

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Edit: Thinking about it a bit more, it might not be that long since I wasn’t into programming back then and hidden files meant little to me. The first time I used it was probably around Leopard.

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Edit 2: It seems like the feature debuted in Lion (10.7). This would make sense since Finder was overhauled in that version to add several features.

Remember this is a toggle, so you can toggle hide/unhide with the same shortcut. I use it pretty often.

This doesn't work on my Mac. Only Cmd + Shift + Fn + . works. Don't know why, tbh.

Thank you!

Also, it works in open/save dialog boxes.

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