Inside your base brochure is aLibrary folder — usually written in Unix sentence structure as~/Library , which means “ a folder name Library at the origin story of your nursing home booklet . ” This pamphlet is accessible only to you , and it ’s used to store your personal circumstance , software - reinforcement files , and , in some causa , data .
The files and folders in ~/Library are by and large meant to be entrust alone , but if you ’ve been using OS X for a while , opportunity are you ’ve cut into inside . Perhaps you wanted to tweak something using a tip fromMacworld , Mac OS 10 Hints , or elsewhere on the Web . Or maybe a developer asked you to edit a preference single file , or grab a logarithm file , while troubleshooting a computer programme . Whatever the case may have been , up until Lion ( OS X 10.7 ) , you simply open your abode folder to reach the Library leaflet .
But after upgrade to Lion , OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion , OS X 10.9 Mavericks , and yes even OS X 10.10 Yosemite , the first time you tried access your personal Library pamphlet , you likely found … well , youdidn’tfind . The folder was gone .
The disappearing Library folder
At least , that ’s how it appears . But rest assured , regardless of your version of OS X , your personal Library folder is right where it ’s always been , at the root level of your Home booklet . It ’s just that , starting in Lion , and continuing in Mountain Lion , Mavericks , and Yosemite , Apple has made the leaflet invisible .
The reason for this move is presumably that citizenry unfamiliar with the inner working of OS go often open ~/Library and start root around , moving and delete data file , only to later key that programs do n’t work in good order , lotion options are run , or — worse — datum is missing . This is the same reason Apple has always hide the folders control OS X ’s Unix underpinnings:/bin,/sbin,/usr , and the corresponding .
While I understand Apple ’s motive here — I’ve had to trouble-shoot more than a few Macs on which an inexperient user has munged the contents of ~/Library — a drug user can have plenty of valid understanding for needing to get at the personal Library folder . fortunately , as I mention , the folder is merely hide , using a peculiar file attribute call thehidden flag . You just need to roll in the hay how to make the folder seeable again .
The setting you need to know
If you ’re still running Lion or Mountain Lion , make the ~/Library folder requires a small bit of work . ( I came up with — no joke—19 slipway to view the brochure in Lion and Mountain Lion . ) But in Mavericks and Yosemite , Apple has made the undertaking much more convenient , provide an easily accessible scope for toggling the visibleness of your user - level Library folder . Here ’s how to use it :
give your home folder ( /Users / yourusername ) in the Finder . reckon on your Finder options , this may be as promiscuous as simply opening a new Finder window . Otherwise , chooseHomefrom the Finder’sGomenu ( Go > Home ) ; or pressShift - Command - H.
Still in the Finder , chooseView > Show View Options(or pressCommand - joule ) .
Near the bottom of the ensue View - Options palette is a place setting called Show Library Folder . Enable this option . Your Library folder is immediately seeable .
conclude the View - Options pallet .
you could access this setting at any time to toggle the visibility of your personal Library folder . For illustration , Macworldsenior contributor Joe Kissell has found that applying an OS X update can make the folder invisible , requiring you to manually make it visible again .
Now that the folder is visible , just call up to be deliberate — because , as I refer above , deleting or moving the haywire file(s ) inside this brochure could cause an app to misbehave , to lose its configurations , or even to lose data point .
