How to show hidden folders in File Manager (Nautilus) on Ubuntu?

Question

How do you show a hidden folder (whose name starts with .) in File Manager a.k.a. Nautilus on Ubuntu? I am somewhat new to Ubuntu and can't seem to find the "view" menu.

Answer 1

Ubuntu 17.10 and earlier

Maximize the folder.

Go to the top menu -->View->Show hidden files:

Or by pressing ctrl + H.

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For permanently showing hidden files, you can go to the Edit>Preferences menu item as shown below:

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With the terminal you should:

cd /path-of-directory 

ls -a 

Answer 2

Ubuntu 18.04

The accepted answer is correct for older versions of Ubuntu.

In the top right corner of file explorer, there is a menu button displayed as 3 stacked line (hamburger menu), clicking on that will open a modal, on that there is an option Show hidden files

Answer 3

Ubuntu 20.04/ 21.04/ 21.10

Using the Nautilus option Show hidden files will only resolve the issue temporarily, but there are ways to set this as the default option.

Terminal

There is a nice one-liner to do this:

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences show-hidden-files true

The settings will take effect immediately (even for currently running instances). You can check current value with:

gsettings get org.gnome.nautilus.preferences show-hidden-files

with GUI

As posted above you may install dconf-editor

sudo apt install dconf-editor

Then search for show-hidden and activate the option org.gnome.nautilus.preferences.

As you can see in the following screenshot the "same" option also exists for other applications such as the Gtk FileChooser, so make sure you activate the setting where you need it. dconf-editor will also show you the key to use for each setting in case you want to set it using gsettings as outlined in the first section of this post.

Answer 4

Ubuntu 20.04

For Ubuntu 20.04, the UI is updated to show hidden files. I could see hidden files even after closing and re-opening the application.

Answer 5

Ubuntu 24.04

1. Click on the three-line menu icon (often called the hamburger menu) in the top right corner.
2. Select "Show Hidden Files" from the dropdown menu.

Keyboard Shortcut

Pressing Ctrl + H on your keyboard will toggle the visibility of the hidden files.

From Terminal

gsettings set org.gtk.gtk4.Settings.FileChooser show-hidden true

Answer 6

Ubuntu 23.10

You can use the following command. It works right away and persists:

gsettings set org.gtk.gtk4.Settings.FileChooser show-hidden true

Answer 7

its really simple

In Ubuntu 18.04, show hidden files is here as shown in the image above...

Isn't it simple

Enjoy!

Answer 8

I found a simple solution for permanently showing hidden files by default.

Using dconf-editor you can search files and toggle the desired setting: