Show system files / Show git ignore in osx

Question

By default it is not possible to see .gitignore files in osx. What is command to reveal these files?

Answer 1

⌘⇧. will toggle the AppleShowAllFiles setting.

This key combo will work from open/save dialogue boxes in all apps, not just the finder. Use this and you’ll never be confused when on someone else’s Mac or a new Mac, and you can avoid mucking around with defaults write.

I use the nemonic of “use a dot to show a dot file” to remember it, because of hidden dot files in unix.

Answer 2

Open the terminal and type

• on OS X 10.8:

  defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
  

• on OS X 10.9:

  defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
  

Then you must relaunch finder:

killall Finder

Any file name in OS X prefixed with a '.' is considered "hidden".

Answer 3

In addition to the accepted answer, you can create an alias to easily show/hide the hidden files in Terminal. This is how I set it up (tested/working on macOS Mojave 10.14.1).

In my user directory I created a new file .custom_aliases and wrote this in:

# Show/hide files
alias showall='defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean true; killall Finder'
alias hideall='defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean false; killall Finder'

Next I opened .bash-profile (should also be in your user directory, if not just create it there) and added this to the top of the file:

# Load custom aliases
source ~/.custom_aliases

And that's it! Now whenever I need to view the hidden files I just type showall in Terminal and hideall when I'm done. You could also define the aliases directly in the .bash_profile, but I have some other stuff so I like to keep all the aliases together in a separate file.

Answer 4

You can use the shortcut in Finder:

Command + Shift + .

It will show the hidden files. To hide the files again, use the same shortcut.

Answer 5

It's possible you might just not have a .gitignore file. If you don't have one, you can create it like this:

>touch ~/.gitignore

And then edit it however you'd like. Git will automatically check this file, without any additional configuration!

Answer 6

(more recent, for 10.10.2:)

The above commands didn't work for me. I'm using OSX Yosemite: 10.10.2. This worked though:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean true;
killall Finder;

Source: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2014/08/04/how-to-show-hidden-files-folders-finder-mac/