If they were all visible, your Mac would look horribly cluttered.īefore you make your Mac show hidden files, it’s important to remember they’ve been hidden for a reason. In addition, there’s no practical reason for most users to see or access them. Mostly, though, it’s because they contain data critical to the smooth running of your Mac and that you shouldn’t interfere. There are several reasons files and folders are hidden.
The files themselves contain data like access rights and privileges for files and folders, application support files, and preferences. You can’t use a “.” at the start of a regular file name otherwise, OS X will hide it. Even the convention of naming them starting with a “.” comes from Unix. The hidden files are a throwback to macOS’ Unix roots. This article will tell you how you can view hidden files on your Mac and make your Library folder visible. These Library folders are hidden because they hold things like preferences for apps that you don’t need to see. Many of these files are in your Mac’s main Library folder or in the ~/Library folder inside the User folder. Many of them are essential to keep your Mac at its best performance. These files and folders are all supposed to be there. Thousands of them in fact, in the form of hidden files and folders lurking on its hard drive or SSD. But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.
#Where to view files on mac download
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