Imagine you use Ubuntu Linux, or some similar Gnome (or XFCE) based Linux distro that comes with a useful and all in all well thought-out configuration. Imagine further that you’re a middle-of-the-road-user, someone who knows her way around the file system and masters some basic maintenance tasks. You know that many programs have configuration files in your home directory, with names like .[program-name]rc. Then you might have stumbled upon the same problem that took me weeks to solve, embarrassingly enough.
Say you want make a small modification to a configuration file, or you are switching from Thunderbird to another e-mail client and want to import your Thunderbird mail, which is somewhere in the /home/yourusername/.mozilla-thuderbird/ folder. So you fire up gedit or open the importation dialogue in the e-mail client, click on “open file” or “import mailbox” … and you can’t find the file or navigate to the Thunderbird folder because the dialogue doesn’t show hidden files or folders. Obviously, for editing, you can call your editor from the command line. But not for importing. And not if you want to open a second hidden file in an existing editor.
You might indeed have the opposite problem: your “open file” dialogue, if it points at your home directory, is polluted by loads and loads of files that start with a dot, and you have to scroll through this interminable list to get to your real data.
The solution for both problems is the same: right-click in the file listing inside the “open file” dialogue and choose “show hidden files”. If hidden files and directories (those that start with a dot) were hidden when you started out, a check mark will appear next to this menu entry, and your hidden files will miraculously appear. If you want to get rid of an over-abundance of hidden files, toggle the check mark off. That’s all.
