unhide

Unhide is a verb used in computing and digital media to indicate the reversal of a hiding action, restoring visibility to a previously concealed item. The term appears in several domains, including operating systems, web interfaces, file management, and collaborative software.

In desktop and mobile operating systems, unhide usually refers to making a hidden file, folder, or interface element visible again. On macOS, for example, files marked as hidden with the “hidden” attribute can be displayed by pressing Command‑Shift‑Period, effectively unhiding them. In Windows, the Properties dialog or the command‑line command “attrib +h” can hide a file, and removing the attribute (“attrib -h”) unhides it. Linux distributions often hide files by prefixing them with a dot; applications such as Nautilus allow users to toggle the display of dotfiles, thereby unhiding them.

Web applications and content management systems frequently provide hide/unhide controls for blog posts, comments, and user profile settings. For instance, a blog author may unhide a draft post to publish it, or a forum moderator might unhide a previously censored reply. In spreadsheet applications, rows, columns, or sheets may be hidden and later unhided via the context menu or menu bar commands.

In programming, the concept appears in code visibility and debugging contexts. A developer may “unhide” a debug log by enabling verbose output, or unhide a private class member in a test harness through reflection. In database tools, data that has been hidden by pivot tables or filtering can be restored to visibility by changing filter settings.

Overall, unhide is a simple yet essential action that restores access to information that was temporarily concealed for organizational, security, or interface reasons.