How to tell Dolphin which files to hide?

KDE's file manager Dolphin can hide some files, e.g., files starting with a .

Is there a way to configure which files it actually hides? For example, I would like to make it hide all files matching

*~
*.synctex.gz
_flymake.
*.log

I found already this post, but it does explain only how to do this in folder views, not in a normal Dolphin window.

If hidden files cannot be configured in KDE/Dolphin, is there maybe another good file manager that supports this feature?

Lars

Posted 2014-10-14T16:02:56.103

Reputation: 193

As your link explains, Linux supports hiding of files with names starting with . - anything else requires new code, either in the form of an add-on, or by modifying the file manager source (it is open-source after all). – AFH – 2014-10-14T16:31:19.730

I thought hiding all these temporary files is a rather common requirement that is already implemented in most (or at least some) file managers. But it looks I was wrong and such a functionality does not exist? And people are happy to scroll through all these files? Or how do others handle them? – Lars – 2014-10-15T09:32:57.643

I periodically delete or move back-up files, but I often look for log files, so I wouldn't want them hidden. Generally software writers design their files so that any of secondary interest have names starting with ., or are held in directories with names starting with .: look at all the configuration data in your home directory. Maybe you can configure your log files similarly. – AFH – 2014-10-15T11:57:29.140

Answers

Recent versions of Dolphin support .hidden files. The .hidden file needs to be created in the same directory as the files to be hidden. Each line in the .hidden file lists one filename in the directory to be hidden. Patterns/file globs such as *~, *.synctex.gz or *.log are not supported unfortunately.

Let's say you would have a directory with the following content:
a.log
b.txt
b.txt~
c.txt
c.txt.gz

and you wanted to hide the files a.log, b.txt~ and c.txt.gz. You would create a file .hidden in the same directory with the following content:
a.log
b.txt~
c.txt.gz

Dolphin would now display only:
b.txt
c.txt

Fabian Ritzmann

Posted 2014-10-14T16:02:56.103

Reputation: 166

Is it me, does this not work with the lost+found directory? – Joschua – 2019-05-15T19:44:32.273

Unfortunately, I do not know if that can be done with Dolphin. It has a filter bar but it does not work so well. It also has some problems with *, ? etc... once upon a time forums say it supported RegEX but it doesn't seem to do so anymore. Maybe some tweaks could be implemented by using a .css style file?

I can suggest a possible answer to the second part of the question: Gwenview, the image viewer, doubles as a nice file manager. It supports filters by Tag, Rating, Date and Name and combinations of the above. You can use the name filtering to perform what you are looking to do, but it is a workaround. However, Gwenview as a file manager is not nearly as full-featured as Dolphin.

AF7

Posted 2014-10-14T16:02:56.103

Reputation: 161