Unhide Library Folder Mac

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Updates

January 26th 2018: Added shortcut method available on macOS Sierra keyboard.

Sep 27, 2016 As you can see, the icon for the Library folder is faded, which means the folder itself is still hidden. Unhide the Library Folder Permanently. If you don’t want to open “Go To Folder” every time you want to access the Library, you can unhide the folder for good. To do this, open Finder, and head to your Home folder. Access Your Hidden Library Folder With These Five Easy Tricks Tuesday, March 21st, 2017 Author: Tom Nelson. The Mac OS is chock full of hidden areas where data, information, or features have been secreted away from Mac users.

September 22nd 2016: Method of showing/hiding hidden files tested and working on macOS Sierra.

December 22nd 2015: Method of showing/hiding hidden files tested and working on Mac OS X El Capitan.

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

The Quickest Way to Show/Hide Hidden Files

Since the release of macOS Sierra, when in Finder, it is now possible to use the shortcut:

Press once to show hidden files and again to hide them. If you’re using a version earlier than macOS Sierra, see Show/Hide Hidden Files using Terminal Aliases to setup a toggle command via terminal.

Thanks to Guido Schlabitz for making me aware of this new shortcut.

Show/Hide Hidden Files the Long Way

Unhide Library Folder On Macbook

The long way to show hidden Mac OS X files is as follows:

  1. Open Terminal found in Finder > Applications > Utilities
  2. In Terminal, paste the following: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
  3. Press return
  4. 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.

Unhide Library Folder On Mac

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.

Library

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:

  1. Open Terminal found in Finder > Applications > Utilities
  2. In Terminal, paste the following: sudo nano ~/.bash_profile
  3. Enter your Mac’s administration password if required, then hit return
  4. 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'

  5. Below that, paste the following: alias hideFiles='defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles NO; killall Finder /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app'

  6. Press ctrl + O and hit return to save the file
  7. Press ctrl + X to exit the file and return to the command line
  8. In Terminal, paste the following: source ~/.bash_profile to refresh your profile and make the aliases available

Now when you want to show hidden files, all you need type in Terminal is showFiles, then hideFiles when you want to hide them.

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

alias tells Terminal we’re adding a new alias.

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

Mac Find Users Folder

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 ; so we can then use the second command:

Chflags Nohidden Library

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

Conclusion

Unhide Library Folder Mac Catalina

With the aliases set up, all you need do in the future is type showFiles and hideFiles to show and hide Mac OS X’s hidden files respectively.

User Folder Mac

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.