If you’re like be, then you’ll most likely have an unhealthy obsession with denim and 70’s rock.

But seriously.

I find myself constantly shifting between showing and hiding hidden files on my mac. Sure its probably easier to just make all hidden files visible at all times, but the clutter drives me insane. The command to show and hide files is way to long for me to dedicate head space to, so I’ve created 2 alias commands that you can enter into terminal or add to your bash_profile file, to take care of this for you.

alias showFiles='defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE; killall Finder'
alias hideFiles='defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE; killall Finder'

Just paste the above into your .bash_profile, fire up terminal, and enjoy ease in which to show and hide these files with hideFiles and showFiles.

###UPDATED: 2014

For those of you running Mavericks, the syntax is a little different. Instead of declaring TRUE/FALSE, it’s now YES/NO.

alias showFiles='defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES; killall Finder'
alias hideFiles='defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles NO; killall Finder'

You may also find that your bash_profile is now actually called profile.