How to hide/deal with dotted (.) folders in windows?

Question

There are a lot of applications that uses the dot notation + application name to store it's data. This is common on *NIX systems but it's not recommended by FreeDesktopStandards, in fact they should use the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME variable, which usually is mapped to $HOME/.config directory.

For instance is very common for an application xyz to create in the current User default folder the following folder ~/.xyz to store it's data. I tried mapping $XDG_CONFIG_HOME to the Windows equivalent variable (%APPDATA%), but no luck.

So my question is, is there a way to definitely hide these dotted folders?

Example:

Answer 1

You can set the files as hidden by opening the command prompt and running:

for /f %f in ('dir C:\Users\Marcos\.* /b') do attrib +h %f

This will look for any files and folders in C:\Users\Marcos\ beginning with a period and mark them with the hidden attribute. You can make this recuresive (i.e. it will search sub folders) by adding /s inside the single quote containing the dir command.

You can also specify a different folder, by changing the path (or removing the path and running it in the desired directory.

As long as explorer is set to not show hidden files and folders you won't see them anymore, otherwise you will see them but they are slightly transparent.