Re: Control hidden folder/file settings?

On Tue, 17 Jan 2006 14:59:37 GMT, mayayana staggered into the Black Sun
and said:
> Is there a way to customize hidden folder and file settings? I've
> noticed that all program subfolders in a user's home folder are
> hidden, which prevents the ability to browse for files using a
> file-open dialogue.

Um. This is imprecise and wrong. I think you mean "all directories and
files that start with a . are hidden", not "all program subfolders".
The convention that all files/directories that start with a . are hidden
from a user's normal view is really, really old. KDE's Konqueror at
least has View->Show Hidden Files. There should be something similar in
whatever file manager you use, and there's always "ls -a".

Applications may make it easy or difficult to find hidden files in their
file open dialogs. It all depends on which toolkit was used. GTK 1
seems to make it difficult to browse hidden files/directories by
default. Of course, you can always enter the filename or directory name
into the edit field. KDE's default file open dialog has Configure->Show
Hidden (F8). YApplicationMV.

I don't think it's currently possible to set things up so that
"directory .crud is hidden, but directory .stuff isn't hidden" is true
in Konqueror. ICBW. Check your file manager's docs for details.

> I tried changing the folder name with the .wine folder as a test,
> changing it to just "wine", but that causes wine to recreate an
> entirely new ".wine" folder without asking.

Yep. Again, ancient convention says that if an application needs to
store per-user config settings, it either makes a directory named
"~/.application/" and stores stuff in there, or makes a file called
"~/.application" and writes settings there. This is supposed to avoid
confusing the users with lots of visible "application.conf" files
cluttering up their ~ . It isn't a hard and fast rule; some apps write
their settings to visible files while others have a more complex
hierarchy (~/.kde/share/$APPNAME/ for KDE apps.) HTH,

--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin / mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong
http://www.brainbench.com / "He is a rhythmic movement of the
-----------------------------/ penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL
.

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