LinLog

I recently started taking advantage of a handy little feature utilized by Kubuntu: the .hidden file. It provides a simple way to hide any file in a directory.

As you may know, the traditional UNIX method for hiding files is to start the name with a period, such as ".vimrc" or ".profile". That works well enough, but there's one obvious problem: you have to rename the file. You can't just go renaming any old file or directory willy-nilly. That's how you break your system.

Hence the .hidden file. You just create a .hidden file in a directory and in it you put the names of any files or directories you want to hide, one per line. That's it. Once you have that, KDE will treat those files/directories as hidden.

This is quite useful for my home directory, because I have my home directory set as my desktop. For the most part, I like this setup. However, there are always a few directories that I seldom, if ever, need to see in the file manager, like ~/Mail or ~/texmf. Using a .hidden file conveniently frees up those extra pixels without the hassle of dealing with symlinks or shortcuts and without the need to reconfigure any software.