Show/Hide Hidden Files on Mac OS X 

It seems like every day I search Google for the command to show hidden files on Mac OS X, not to mention Googling for the command to then hide those hidden files a few minutes later.

Today I decided to make a short and easy to remember alias to speed up the process. All I need do now is type

whenever I need to show/hide OS X’s hidden files. Here’s how you can do it too.

Open Terminal found in Finder > Applications > Utilities

Hold the ‘Option/alt’ key, then right click on the Finder icon in the dock and click Relaunch.

Relaunch Finder by right clicking the Finder Icon whilst holding the ‘Option/alt’ key

This will show all hidden files. To hide them again, follow the same steps but replace the Terminal command with:

It’s not the longest set of instructions or the biggest command to commit to memory but if you’re doing this a lot, it’s worth spending a few minutes now to save yourself a lot more time in the future.

Show/Hide Hidden Files using Terminal Aliases

A Terminal alias is a name or shortcut for one or multiple commands. Using an easy to remember alias, we can turn the above four step process into just one.

An alias can be made temporarily (just for the use of one terminal session) or permanently. As we want this to be a shortcut used now and in the future, let’s make it permanent:

Enter your Mac’s administration password if required, then hit return

At the bottom of the open .bash_profile file, paste the following:

alias showFiles=\'defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES; killall Finder /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app\'

alias hideFiles=\'defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles NO; killall Finder /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app\'

Press ctrl + X to exit the file and return to the command line

to refresh your profile and make the aliases available

Now when you want to show hidden files, all you need type in Terminal is

If you want to modify the behaviour or alias names, let’s take a closer look at the commands you just added:

is the name of the alias. Change this to what you wish.

We then give the alias two commands. The first being:

This is the command to show hidden files and is ended with a semi-colon

This will relaunch the Finder (to replicate the step of holding the ‘Option/alt’ key then right clicking the Finder icon in the dock).

to show and hide Mac OS X’s hidden files respectively.

Aliases can be used to speed up your interaction with the Terminal. Set up an alias for navigating to your most used directories, to commit to a GitHub repo and so on.

Ian Lunn is a freelance Web Designer & Front-end Developer. Providing quality user experience through responsive web design and performant front-end development. Creator of open-source projects Sequence.js and Hover.css, and author of CSS3 Foundations.

A graduate of Internet Technology, Ian combines his education with 7 years commercial experience in responsive web design and front-end development to produce quality user experiences for happy clients over the world.

Web Designer & Front-end Developer. Available October 2015. Hire Now

Follow @IanLunn for web design & development articles, opinions and links

View @IanLunn on GitHub for open-source projects such as Hover.css, Sequence.js and jQuery Parallax