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.
Maximize the folder.
Go to the top menu -->View->Show hidden files:
Or by pressing ctrl + H.
For permanently showing hidden files, you can go to the Edit>Preferences menu item as shown below:
With the terminal you should:
cd /path-of-directory
ls -a
The accepted answer is correct for older versions of Ubuntu.
For newer versions, the image displayed below works
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
its really simple
In Ubuntu 18.04, show hidden files is here as shown in the image above...
Isn't it simple
Enjoy!
I found a simple solution for permanently showing hidden files by default.
Using dconf-editor you can search files and toggle the desired setting:
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.
Using the Nautilus option Show hidden files will only resolve the issue temporarily, but there are ways to set this as the default option.
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).
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.