Show hidden files in FileZilla
At the risk of making myself the laughingstock of the web development community: I've been using FileZilla for 7 years and only last week finally figured out how to show hidden files. "Force show hidden files" has never worked. If you have the same problem, read this article.
Tl,dr: See bottom.
If you're a web developer, there's no getting around SFTP (and unfortunately still FTP). I use FileZilla for that. It's free and does the job. However, I worked with it for almost 7 years without it showing me hidden files and directories. Via ssh I could always find the corresponding data on the server. Just not with FileZilla. This drove me crazy. Because, of course, I had to transfer .htaccess files and other hidden stuff in several cases. Most of the time I dragged and dropped them from the Finder view (hidden files are displayed on the Mac with cmd+ Shift+ .) in the local development environment into the directory on the target server. Conversely, FileZilla found the files on the server when I explicitly searched for them using the search function.
Force hidden files to show
I can't tell you how many times I clicked on "Force show hidden files". But I do know that it never did anything. As it turns out, this feature is a holdover from the old days and has no effect on modern servers. So if it works for you, I recommend updating the server. But how to show hidden files now?
Hidden files and directories were filtered out
Recently, I wanted to show only the files of a certain type, so I started to use FileZilla's filter function. And what caught my eye? A check mark at "Configuration Files". I don't know how it got there, because I never opened this menu before. FileZilla has mostly stayed in factory settings for me so far. Well. After unchecking it, I was shown all the hidden data on my server. The only thing that amazes me is that I have googled this problem so many times and never has this solution been suggested. Maybe they just assume that a normal person would check their filter settings beforehand. Ha! They didn't reckon with me!
So here's the tl;dr:
Go to View-> "File and Directory Filters" and make sure no check mark is set on "Configuration Files". More information can be found here: Filename Filters - FileZilla Wiki.
I really hope that this little tip will make life easier for somebody. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment. Insider tip: Subscribe to my newsletter. It's free, comes rarely and when it does, it has exclusive freebies on board.