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Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

> And like that there are a lot of other UX small things that make for a more pleasant experience in the Mac, particularly for end users.

Completely disagree. Yesterday I had to figure out how to display hidden files in finder. I had to google it // apparently there is some hidden key sequence of command option control alt hell that toggles it. It is not exposed in menus anywhere and there shortcut it not all obvious. So next week I’ll be googling it again.

Contrast that with most linux UIs and even Windows. Context-menus display all possible options (generally)... nothing is hidden from the user.

Most of my gripes about MacOS have to do with the finder and context menus. They suck.

This is one example of many.

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You can enable it system-wide with a defaults setting. Most devs I know do.

Most end-users don't know what a hidden file with a `.` is, would never create one, and don't particularly care for that level of clutter in a directory.

As another comment just made points out, this is not something the vast majority of Mac users will, or should, be doing. For the rest of us, we're likely to be doing it often enough to remember the shortcut — it's second nature to me now.

The big problem is discoverability, as you imply.

> all possible options ... nothing is hidden from the user

This is the key bit. Showing all possible options would go utterly against the mac ethos.

Not only that, it is begging for people to shoot themselves in the foot (and later call techies to fix their broken computer with no idea what they did).

On a Mac invisible files aren't important for even a "pro" user... except for occasional developer needs. It worth saying a feature like this doesn't come without cost.

Progressive disclosure and a bullet proof user environment are core user concepts on MacOS. In MacOS a user can rearrange nearly every file visable to them, and never break anything.

Windows and Linux clutter up the users environment with files that literally no one will ever care about (1000 library modules and asset files for a binary application?). And yet they are less flexible to user choice. Move application out of the Application folder... boom! Pathing all breaks. Do the same on MacOS no problem.

“I had to figure out how to display hidden files in finder.”

Displaying hidden files is not generally an end user feature.

As a user I would like to be able to attach my .vimrc, .bashrc, etc to emails to colleagues so they can see what I have in my settings.

In general, end users don’t even have a .vimrc, .bashrc, etc. If you even know these things exist, you’re an exception.

True. Most users will have a .emacs file.

Mac installs vim and bash by default but seeing their configuration files in Finder is spooky and not normal? It's not a terribly convincing argument that there should be no context menu in the Open File dialog window for showing/hiding hidden files.

Well, they switched to zsh, but yeah.

There is no GUI version of Vim or Bash provided. They are expected to be used via the command line, where hidden files can be seen just as they can on any other Unix.

What fraction of Mac users do you think have every used vim or bash, let alone even opened Terminal.app? Or even know that it exists?

As a Mac user who uses command prompts all day every day, I don't open Terminal.app.

I have often wished there was a way to set certain dotfiles to be unhidden, without hiding everything. It could be done with extended attributes (which can already be used to hide a non dot file, this would just be the reverse).

I don't think this would be an overly severe UNIX violation? Dot files would still be hidden by default, the extended attribute would just be an override.

Yeah this is a poor adaptation of unix software to macOS. Those tools ought to have their config files either moved to or symlinked into ~/Library/Preferences with non-dot-prefixed names in order to make sense on the Mac. It's a shame even Apple's ports don't do this.

The shortcut for toggling display of hidden items in Finder is `Command + Shift + .`. But you're correct that it's not documented anywhere which is a big point of frustration. There's tons of incredibly useful undocumented macOS features.

Isn’t the keyboard shortcut somewhat mnemonic? ⌘⇧.

What about that shortcut is mnemonic?

The command to show dotfiles is the two most commonly used modifier keys, plus a dot. If you told someone the shortcut was mnemonic but didn't tell them the specific keystrokes, they'd probably be able to guess with a minute or so of experimentation.

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