How do you show a hidden folder (whose name starts with .) in File Manager a.k.a. Nautilus on Ubuntu? I am somewhat new to Ubuntu and can't seem to find the "view" menu.
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31Press CTRL+H and all hidden folders will appear. Pressing it again will hide all hidden folders. – Camicri May 22 '14 at 23:13
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4Ctrl+H will work in Nautilus, Nemo, Thunar etc, but for Dolphin (KDE's file manager), it may be Alt+. or similar. – Wilf Nov 28 '14 at 20:48
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See How to show hidden files and folder in Ubuntu – Aniket Thakur Feb 03 '18 at 05:54
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How do I configure this via the terminal? – masterxilo Feb 14 '21 at 19:38
6 Answers
177
Ubuntu 17.10 and earlier
Maximize the folder.
Go to the top menu -->View->Show hidden files:
Or by pressing ctrl + H.
For permanently showing hidden files, you can go to the Edit>Preferences menu item as shown below:
With the terminal you should:
cd /path-of-directory
ls -a
41
Ubuntu 18.04 and newer
The accepted answer is correct for older versions of Ubuntu.
For newer versions, the image displayed below works
In the top right corner of file explorer, there is a menu button displayed as 3 stacked line (hamburger menu), clicking on that will open a modal, on that there is an option Show hidden files
Dan
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Utkarsh Gupta
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2
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2This is not a permanent fix; for me, it reverts back to hiding files (v20.04). – josephwb Aug 30 '20 at 03:47
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3Is there a way to make this permanent?! I've delete my .git files the thousandth time over now... – Bim Feb 09 '21 at 21:19
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5
Ubuntu 20.04/ 21.04/ 21.10
Using the Nautilus option Show hidden files will only resolve the issue temporarily, but there are ways to set this as the default option.
Terminal
There is a nice one-liner to do this:
gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences show-hidden-files true
The settings will take effect immediately (even for currently running instances).
with GUI
As posted above you may install dconf-editor
sudo apt install dconf-editor
Then search for show-hidden and activate the option org.gnome.nautilus.preferences.
As you can see in the following screenshot the "same" option also exists for other applications such as the Gtk FileChooser, so make sure you activate the setting where you need it. dconf-editor will also show you the key to use for each setting in case you want to set it using gsettings as outlined in the first section of this post.
Mushroomator
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The terminal one did the trick, thanks a lot! But beware, you wrote "gsettings set" twice. – Jem Oct 26 '22 at 12:33
4
For Ubuntu 20.04, the UI is updated to show hidden files. I could see hidden files even after closing and re-opening the application.
Manoj Attal
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its really simple
In Ubuntu 18.04, show hidden files is here as shown in the image above...
Isn't it simple
Enjoy!
Muntaha Liaqat
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Because this is the simplest method that I know and only few clicks can do your work... enjoy :) – Muntaha Liaqat Apr 15 '19 at 09:41
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I found a simple solution for permanently showing hidden files by default.
Using dconf-editor you can search files and toggle the desired setting:
Greenonline
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Neveh
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