The PocketSmith Blog

Although there are an inordinate number of applications that allow you to show and hide the hidden and system files in OS X, it has always felt a little bloaty to me. I did use XMod (http://www.geekpeaksoftware.com/xMod.html) for sometime, however I didn’t like that I had a whole host of functions I never use to just show / hide hidden files – and it takes four clicks to do so once you are even in the app. Fussy I know.

I have just stumbled across this nugget here – which lists the command to show and hide files, with the commands etc.

So what I’m doing here is using these commands to make a little terminal command that quickly shows and hides the files, instead of having to remember / look / copy + paste the command, or clicking like a maniac in XMod. If you are not comfortable using Terminal, just grab XMod above

1. Open up Terminal
2. Enter the following to edit your bash profile
   nano ~/.bash_profile
3. Copy and paste the following three lines in at the end – make sure they are on separate lines. You will need to keyboard navigate arrows etc (just in case you aren’t familiar with nano)
   alias show_hf="defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE; killall Finder"
alias hide_hf="defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE; killall Finder"

4. Save the file (WriteOut – control (not command) + O) and exit (control + X)
5. Enter the following into the Terminal to reload your bash profile:
   source ~/.bash_profile

You can now open your terminal, and enter the following to show all files quickly:

show_hf

And then to re-hide them:

hide_hf

Of course you can name these aliases anything you want.

Now, this post is not without a disclaimer – the above could be done much more elegantly I’m sure. I tinkered with setting it up as an Automator script so that we could have a little icon in the dock to click on. However I didn’t Google enough to figure out how to test what the current setting for AppleShowAllFiles is, and Terminal works well enough for me. If you have any insights let me know in the comments

Tags: hints, os x, tips

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 3:57 pm by James and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.