Power Tip #4: Showing & Hiding Hidden Files on a Mac

As a web developer I'm often working with .htaccess files in my projects. When I want to test a new .htaccess configuration for mod_rewrite I usually make an upload directly to the ftp server (not quite the best development cycle ;-) … I know).

Trying to locate the file in Finder I had no luck. The reason is that Mac OS an unix based operating system is and all files starting with a dot won't be shown in Finder.
One could however upload the file via Terminal with a command line, but that's not a solution to me.

There is a Mac OS command that reveals these hidden files:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

And you can hide them again with:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder

It's important to kill Finder to apply the changes.

 

Now there is even a better solution without any command line typing: a widget for your Dashboard.

It's called hiddenfiles and you can download it directly from Apple's website.