Nautilus Hide – Easily Hide Files & Folders in Nautilus File Manager

To manually hide files on Linux one typically has to either prefix the filename using a dot (.) or suffixing a tilde (~) but now there is an extension that does the adding for you more easily. It’s called Nautilus Hide.

Nautilus Hide is an open source Python-based extension with which you can hide files without renaming them. The awesome feature about the extension is that it adds the hide/unhide options to the right-click menu of the Nautilus file manager; no extra scripting or manual tweaks required!

Features in Nautilus Hide

• Free to download and use.
• Open source with source code available for contributions on GitHub.
• Adds hide/unhide options to Nautilus’ right-click menu.

At present there are no pre-build binaries, all you have to do is compile it from source using following commands.

$ git clone https://github.com/brunonova/nautilus-hide.git
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake {path to nautilus-hide}
$ make
$ sudo make install

If Nautilus is running, restart it with the following command:

$ nautilus -q

Nautilus Hide – How It Works

Just in case you were wondering how Nautilus Hide works, the developers explain it on the GitHub page so I will just quote them below:

Some file managers, like Nautilus, offer an alternative way of hiding files: you create a text file that lists, line-by-line, the names of all the files you want to hide and save it in that folder with the name “.hidden”. The next time you open or refresh that folder, those files will not be visible.

So, that’s how it works! I guess people who knew how Linux handles hiding files before now must have devised a method like the above for themselves but they didn’t share the idea with the world. Thanks to the open source community, that’s a reality now.

What’s your take on the Nautilus Hide extension? Did you already have a hiding/unhiding solution? The comments section is below.