Hide Folders App Problems Mac

09.09.2020by
  1. Hide Folders App Problems Mac Os
  2. Hide Files On Mac

Feb 10, 2019  Once you’ve downloaded the app from the App Store, and launched it, all you have to do is click on the menu bar icon for HiddenMe, and then click on ‘ Hide Desktop Icons.’ That’s it, your desktop icons will now be hidden.

Sometimes there is a need to hide files on a Mac from other people's eyes. I'll share some effective ways to hide and unhide files and folders on your Mac with you today. First of all, we will take a look at some built-in Mac functions and after that, I will guide you through the process of how you can hide files and folder in one click.
For those who in hurry download Hider 2 app (it's free for download) the app will help you to hide and unhide files and folders on your Mac easily.
All other, let’s start!

How to Hide Files on Mac using Terminal

Let's see what ways the Mac OS offers us. They are completely free and quite effective. We’ll use the standard Mac app called 'Terminal' that can be found on any Mac (just open Spotlight and type 'Terminal' then press Enter to open the Terminal).

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Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how to hide files and folders on your Mac manually using Terminal:

  1. Open the Terminal window. After it opens, type the command I noted below (a space between the words is obligatory).

chflags hidden

  1. Next, drag-and-drop a file or a folder from the Finder into the opened Terminal window.

The file/folder path will appear in the Terminal. The command is run by pressing Enter. It will make the file/folder vanish. The Finder won’t show such files anymore. But don’t worry, as the command doesn’t delete them, but hides.

How to Find Hidden Files/Folders on Mac OS X

There wouldn’t be any problems if you need to have a quick access to the hidden files or folders. Open the Finder, Click the ‘Go’ menu, and then tap on the 'Go to folder'.

Hide Folders App Problems Mac Os

Insert the folder path which we hide before into the dialog box, then press Enter or click Go. ‘~’ means your user folder. For example, if you have a folder with the name ‘SomeSecret’ on the desktop, enter ~/Desktop/SomeSecret. If this folder is located in Documents, enter ~/Documents/SomeSecret.

Now you know how to access the hidden folders even if they don’t appear in save dialogs or the Finder. All the files that were stored in that folder will be hidden, so it’s no chance that someone would open them accidentally in that way. You’ll see them only by typing the direct path in the Finder.

Let’s Learn How to Views Hidden Files on Mac via the Finder

Yes, you read this right. The Finder can’t show us hidden folders but offers such an option for files. Still, it’s not a graphical option, so you’ll have to work with the Terminal and restart the Finder.

Open a Terminal window and type the commands noted below. Press Enter after each command.

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

killall Finder

The first one tells Finder to make your hidden files appear and the second command restarts it. Once you’ve done, hidden files will become visible in the Finder. If you wish to hide those files again, run the following commands:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE

killall Finder

They disable the option of showing all your files and restart the Finder.

How to Unhide a Folder or File on Mac OS X Manually

Unhiding folders and files on your Mac are as simple as it can be! Run the same command that you used for hiding them, but change ‘hidden’ to ‘nohidden’. Or copy this text into a Terminal window:

Hide Folders App Problems Mac

chflags nohidden

If you know the exact path of the hidden folder or file, type it. If you don’t, try to display them in Finder in the way I mentioned above and drag and drop them into the Terminal.

By the way, you can use the arrow buttons to manage these files. Press the ‘Up’ key while you are using the Terminal to move through the previous commands and find the one that made the folder or file you need hidden. Use the ‘Left’ arrow key to move to the ‘hidden’ part of that command and shift it to ‘nohidden’, then press Enter.

Don’t forget to push Enter then folder or file becomes unhidden to save the changes.

In general, hiding folders and files on your Mac may be useful, if you share your working machine with others.

How to Hide Files and Folders on your Mac using the Hider 2 App

Now you know how to hide your secrets with the Terminal. However, there is another easier way to hide files and folders on your Mac. The app I talk about is calledHider 2. It has an excellent and thoughtful interface, so you’ll understand how to use it in a couple of minutes. Let's see how this works:

  1. At first, download Hider 2 (it’s free for Download) and install it on your Mac
  2. Open the app, go through the initial setup, select a name and a password for your Vault. You’ll use them for opening your secret file vault (you can also specify a hint that you would help you to remind the password in case you forget it).

Then the Hider 2 interface will appear. You’ll have an opportunity of adding and deleting files and folders there, as well as hiding or making them visible again.

Now let’s try to hide a folder and all files in it. For instance, I’ve created a folder called ‘My Secret Files’. Now we can try to click the plus button at the bottom of Hider 2 window and select the files on your Mac that need to be added to your secret vault.

After that, press Open button and notice that they’ve become invisible. The slider from the right side changed from ‘visible’ to ‘invisible’ state in the Hider interface. The files themselves appear to be gone from the folder now (they are invisible). That’s it! We have hidden the files we needed.

There is a special button called ‘Lock Hider’ (at the top left corner of the window) that closes the app and doesn’t give access to it without the password. Hence, no one will be able to access your vault. As you see hiding files on Mac can be much easier to use the special app then built-in functions of the Terminal.

Conclusions: How to Hide or Unhide Files and Folders on Mac

Hide Files On Mac

Of course, you can always use the Terminal to hide and unhide files and folders on your Mac, but the process seems to be long and uncomfortable. Moreover, you don’t have a list of all the hidden files, plus they aren’t located in one place.

Hider 2, on the contrary, stores all your files in one place. You can see a list of all your safely hidden files anytime you need. You can hide or unhide any folder or file in just one click. Hider offers an opportunity for storing your secret notes in one place as well. It’s very convenient.

The main disadvantage of Hider 2 is the fact that a paid version costs about $20. Still, it’s a one-time fee. I think it's worth it.

Thank you for reading this article!


Changing the visibility of the user’s files and folders to make it invisible might be because of personal or security reasons. However, doing the same for the macOS requires some technical expertise. Usually, macOS comes with features that help to hide files on Mac devices just like any other operating system. But accessing those options is quite a tricky job in macOS when compared to Windows and Linux.

How To Hide Files And Folders Via Terminal

If you want to know how to hide files in macOS, you need to set the “hidden” attribute for it so that the finder and other Mac apps do not display the chosen file or folder by default. Instead of hiding an individual file, you can create a hidden folder. To initiate this, you can first open a terminal window- press Command+Space, then type ‘Terminal’ and at last press Enter.

Once you enter the terminal, type “chflags hidden” command and include a space at the end of it. After you are done with this, drag-and-drop the folder that you want to find from the Finder and put it into the terminal window. This would make the path of the file or folder visible in the terminal.

After you press enter, the file or folder will automatically vanish i.e., it would be hidden, and Finder would not show it by default.

How to View Hidden Files and Folders On..Hide or show the hidden files and folders on your Mac with Terminal. Just type two commands and voila, you..

How To Hide Files From Spotlight Search

Although you can make files and folders invisible from Finder, spotlight search finds all files and folders on your Mac device. Therefore, to hide your files from the Spotlight Search, follow these steps: –

  • Go to System Preferences
  • Then go to Spotlight
  • Select Privacy. Here, add the folder that you need to exclude from Spotlight Search.
  • Now hide the folder, which includes your important files

Spotlight Search cannot show your hidden files anymore.

‘Secret Folder’ App- Easiest Way To Hide and View Hidden Files On Mac

If you don’t want to hide file and folder with Terminal and want to hide my mac in a straightforward fashion, then it’s better that you use a third-party app. With this, you would be able to hide the files from view and lock them up with the help of a password. Secret Folder app is one such app that can be used to hide all files and can be availed after paying a certain amount. You might find the app a bit pricey, but it provides a great protection for hidden files and folders. In addition to that, it also provides a password-protected vault, which makes use of AES 256-bit encryption that is extremely difficult to break into. The steps to download and use this secret folder mac app are as follows: –

  • Download the app and click next until you reach the screen that says create vault.
  • Now create a password that you would be using for unlocking the vault and click on the “Create Vault” option.
  • After this, you would see a drop-down menu that would appear after you click the button. Here, you can select the secret folder to hide all files.
  • Once this is done you can drag and drop the folders and files that you wish to hide and close the app. The password lock would then automatically get activated after this step is taken.
  • When you want to access the hidden folders, you can launch secret folder and enter the password to open it. After that, you can double click the file or folder and click on “Unhide All” present at the bottom of the vault to access the files.

Another way to hide files in macOS is that you can store them in the Library and assume it to be hidden. For this, you can hold down the Option key, go to the Library folder, create a new folder in that and just drag all the files and folders that you want to hide in them. Apart from this, another answer to your ‘how to hide folders on mac’ issue is by creating a new user in the System Preferences’ users or the group preference pane and putting the files and folders that need to be hidden in that account.

If you have the “Apple’s Developer Tools” installed in your Macbook, you can use it to hide all files and folder. To use this method, you can go to the Terminal and enter “setfile –a V“along with the name of the folder or file, and this would automatically change the visibility to invisible. In order to undo this option, repeat the same command but now with a lowercase v.”

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Now here are few steps to see hidden files on Mac: –

How To View Hidden Files

In case, you do not know how to see hidden files on mac, you can run the same command (chflags hidden). Just change “hidden” to “nohidden.” If you somehow remember the path of the folder or file, you can type that in the terminal and access it. If not, then you can type “chflags nohidden” to find the folder in Finder and then drag and drop that in the Terminal just like in the previous steps. Instead of this, if you want to go with the easy way for how to show hidden folders, you can also press the up arrow key present at the terminal to go to the previous commands, locate the right one that you want and access the hidden file or folder. You can even use the left arrow key to access the “hidden” part of the command and change it to “nohidden”. Then you can press Enter. Once you are done doing this, the file or the folder would automatically become unhidden and you would be able to browse through it.

If you want to know how to view hidden files in the library, then here are some keyboard shortcuts that you can apply to make it visible.

  • Go to the menu and open Finder > Open the Macintosh HD folder by opening the devices option present in the left column. Now hold the Cmd + Shift +. (dot) keys, and you would see that the hidden files would now be visible. To undo this, you can use the same key combination and the files would be hidden.
  • As an alternative option, you can open finder, hold down Alt key and choose Go option from the dropdown menu bar present on the top of the screen and you would see the library folder listed down in the Home folder.
  • Apart from this, you can even use the following option: Go to the Finder, choose the Go from the menu bar or press Shift + Cmd + G. After this, you can type ~/Library into the text box and click on Go.
  • You can also Open Terminal and type the following command at the prompt: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean false ; killall Finder to initiate the action.
  • When you are considering the Mavericks and Yosemite operating system and if there is a display bug that has hidden files in the Open or Save dialog box, then you need to understand that the keyboards shortcuts for accessing the same would not work in the Finder’s view mode. However, the other views such as cover flow, list, and icon would just work fine if you want to display the hidden files.
  • For El Capitan and macOS Sierra, the keyboard shortcuts that are used for showing the hidden files in the Open and Save dialog boxes just work quite well but you need to take care of a little detail along with them as well. There are even times when some of these dialog boxes do not display all the icons for the finder view and hence you need to keep a check on them for accessing the files.
  • In case, you want to change a different Finder View, you can do so by clicking the Sidebar icon present in the toolbar on the left. Doing so would enable all the views on the Finder view and you would be able to access all the icons at once.

The role of the command line during the entire process can be divided into two parts: At first, it helps in changing the file settings to show files and secondly, it helps in restarting the finder to show hidden files immediately.

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For most of the time, the macOS hidden files and folders are always kept out of view, but during certain times when the files need to stay hidden especially if there is a virus or malware attack which can cause issues in the system files and affect the folders which might no longer work and then you might need to fix them manually to ensure that you can access all the files back. As there can be plethora of hidden files and folders in your MacOS, you can browse through your files in the Finder Window and select the one that you want to access at the moment. Also, you need to take extra care when it comes to the configuration files and do not delete or modify them unless you are sure about their roles.

The overall task of accessing hidden file and folder might prove to be bit tedious as you can no longer view them directly in the Finder. However, if you want to show hidden folders on mac quickly, then you can do so by toggling the Finder’s ability to reveal the hidden files rather than making different files visible again. Another important thing that you should remember is that if you accidentally delete a hidden file, you can access back with the help of Disk Drill.

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