How to show hidden files on your Mac

Your Mac has a secret. Thousands of them in fact, in the form of hidden files and folders lurking on its hard drive or SSD. Don’t worry, though. These files and folders are all supposed to be there. Many of them are essential to keep your Mac at its best performance.

Many of these files are in your Mac’s main Library folder or in the ~/Library folder inside the User folder. These Library folders are hidden because they hold things like preferences for apps that you don’t need to see.

This article will tell you how you can view hidden files on your Mac and make your Library folder visible.

What are the hidden files on Mac?

The hidden files are a throwback to macOS’ Unix roots. Even the convention of naming them starting with a “.” comes from Unix. You can’t use a “.” at the start of a regular file name; otherwise, OS X will hide it.

The files themselves contain data like access rights and privileges for files and folders, application support files, and preferences.

There are several reasons files and folders are hidden. Mostly, though, it’s because they contain data critical to the smooth running of your Mac and that you shouldn’t interfere. In addition, there’s no practical reason for most users to see or access them. If they were all visible, your Mac would look horribly cluttered.

How to view hidden files on Mac

Before you make your Mac show hidden files, it’s important to remember they’ve been hidden for a reason. The data they contain could cause havoc if you delete or alter it and don’t know what you’re doing.

If your goal in viewing, for example, ~/Library is so you can manually delete application support files for a program you’ve uninstalled, consider using a dedicated uninstaller like CleanMyMac X. That will make it easy to remove all the files associated with an application with one click. You can download CleanMyMac X for free here. 

I like the CleanMyMac X for allowing me to get rid of all the hidden files I no longer need. Usually, those files just sit there clogging up my hard drive. CleanMyMac X scans Mac, identifies all system junk, and allows quickly and easily free up gigabytes of disk space.

If you still want to view hidden files on your Mac, you need to go to the Finder and do the following:

1. Open a new Finder window and click on the name of your Mac under ‘Devices’ in the sidebar.
2. Click on Macintosh HD or whatever you’ve called your startup drive.
3. Press Command-Shift-. (period). You should now see many files and folders whose name starts with “.” become visible.
4. To re-hide, the files and folders, hold down Command-Shift-. again.

How to view your Mac’s ~/Library folder

There are a couple of methods for making your ~/Library folder visible. Here’s the simplest:

1. Click on the Finder in the Dock.
2. Open a new Finder window and navigate to your user folder (Tip: if it’s not in the sidebar, go to the Finder menu, choose Preferences, click the sidebar and check the box next to your Home folder)
3. Click on the Go menu.
4. Hold down the Option (Alt) key.
5. You should see that in the dropdown menu, Library appears below Home. Click on it.

Alternatively, do this to view your Library folder:

1. Click on the Finder in the Dock.
2. Click on the Go menu and choose Go to Folder.
3. In the window that opens, type “~/Library”

With both these methods, your Library folder will disappear again when you close the Finder window. It’s easy enough to run through the steps above again to make it visible when you need to, but if you want it permanently accessible, there are a couple of ways to do it.

The quickest is to drag the Library folder to the Finder’s sidebar. That will create a shortcut to it that will persist. If you want to keep ~/Library visible but don’t want it clogging up the sidebar in Finder windows, do this:

1. Click on the Finder in the Dock.
2. Click on the View menu and choose Show View Options.
3. Check the box labeled Show Library Folder at the bottom of the window.

How to make macOS show hidden files using Terminal

If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you can use the Terminal command line interface to view hidden files and folders. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open Terminal from the Utilities folder in Applications or by searching for it using Spotlight. You can also use the Go menu in the Finder to go directly to the Utilities folder.
2. Type, or copy and paste, this command: defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles true
3. Press Return
4. Type: killall Finder

Repeat the above steps to hide the files again, but replace ‘true’ with ‘false’ at the end of step 2.

How to hide any file or folder using Terminal

Now that you know how to view hidden files and folders on your Mac, you may be wondering how you can hide other files or folders to keep them away from prying eyes. There are some third-party applications and utilities that offer to do this for you, but you can do it yourself in Terminal, like this:

1. Launch Terminal.
2. Type: chflags hidden
3. Press the spacebar.
4. Drag the file or folder you want to hide from the Finder onto the Terminal window.
5. You’ll see the path to the file or folder displayed in Terminal after the command you typed.
6. Hit Return to execute the command.

The file or folder you dragged onto the Terminal window will now be hidden. To see it again, use one of the above methods to see hidden files.

To make the file visible permanently again, use the steps above, but in step 2, type: chflags nohidden

As you can see, viewing hidden files and folders on your Mac is very straightforward. There are so many ways to do it, and you can make them visible temporarily or permanently. Many of those files are stored in Library folders, including the one in your User folder, ~/Library. That folder is hidden by default, but you can view it or make it permanently visible using the techniques described above.

However, just because you can view hidden files doesn’t mean you should — the files are usually hidden because accidentally deleting them or altering them could cause chaos on your Mac. So, while it’s OK to have a peek, don’t do anything with the hidden files unless you know what you’re doing.

If you want to declutter your Mac or uninstall applications, try using CleanMyMac X. It will safely remove useless files, add-ons, broken login items, caches, large and old files you didn’t know you had. Most likely, you won’t even need to look for hidden files — CleanMyMac X will do the job for you.