I’m going through the Mac learning experience for the second time, and am still stunned by some things that you expect but just aren’t there. I’ve just spent 20 mins trying to find the option in Finder to turn on/off the display of hidden files.

Finder doesn’t have such a toggle! At least not from the GUI. Thankfully, this post from LifeHacker got me out of trouble. Open a terminal window (Applications->Utilities->Terminal) and enter the following commands:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

And of course, to reverse the action repeat the process replacing TRUE with FALSE.

All in all, Finder is a pretty poor excuse for a file manager. Looks like I’ll have to buy another copy of Path Finder