How to see hidden files and folders in the MacOS popup Finder

“Oh come on you silly Mac the folder is right here.”

A quick MacOS usage tip here. The other day I was setting up VSCode to view my local Kubernetes cluster for use with the official K8s extension, and by default minikube puts the config in a location like Users/user_name/.kube/config. Note the . in .kube. When you setup that extension and point it at a kubeconfig file of some sort, it opens a little popup version of the Finder tool, and when I navigated into the Users/user_name/ directory of course VSCode couldn’t see the /kube directory.

Now normally MacOS actually has a setting in the Finder preferences to make hidden folders and files visible, however being on a new Macbook I hadn’t set that up yet. Also having that on all the time can make the Finder tool a little….cluttered, when just using it to hunt down that custom emoji you want to upload to Slack. Turns out theres a slick shortcut to quickly toggle on seeing hidden items that works really well for this pop up view.

While clicked into the Finder window, just type

Cmd+Shift+.

and BAM hidden files. Super slick for when you just want to quickly see that one pesky .config file or something.

Happy hunting.

Written on October 21st , 2021 by RM Terrell Photo credit of RM Terrell