Solved Viewing hidden items on File Explorer in Win 11

In Win 10 I could see everything on the ribbon in file explorer, I'm not seeing the same in Win 11, I can see with several clicks I can get to the older version of view, show or hide hidden files. Seems that Win 11 went backwards unless I don't know how to set it up so I see on the ribbon. Can that be done in Win 11?

Hello Ron,

If you like, you might see if adding the "Hidden Items" context menu below may make it easier to use for you.

Brink said:

Hello Ron,

If you like, you might see if adding the "Hidden Items" context menu below may make it easier to use for you.

Add Hidden items Context Menu in Windows 11 Tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to add a custom Hidden items context menu to make it easy to hide/unhide selected files/folders and hide/show hidden items on demand in Windows 10 and Windows 11. Hidden files, folders, and drives do not show by default in Windows. Hidden files, folders, and...

www.elevenforum.com

Click to expand...

I downloaded and ran the regedit file and I do see the hide and show when I right click but if i select one my screen just goes blank and comes back I just checked and it didn't create a restore point so I can go back.. Any suggestions? I just noticed that I have these on my desktop, I must have ran the download twice. In fact the first time I didn't get anything so I did run it again. I have no idea what these icons are

When you click on the "Hide protected OS files" or "Show protected OS files" items, it will quickly open a command prompt, run a command, close the command prompt for that setting, and restart the explorer process to apply. This would be the screen going blank for a second as the explorer process is restarted.

This is normal to toggle that setting.

Brink said:

When you click on the "Hide protected OS files" or "Show protected OS files" items, it will quickly open a command prompt, run a command, close the command prompt for that setting, and restart the explorer process to apply. This would be the screen going blank for a second as the explorer process is restarted.

This is normal to toggle that setting.

Click to expand...

Okay that makes sense now, when I click more options hide/show hidden items it works as it did in Win 10, well it does the same thing. What is the hide and show OS files??

The show/hide OS files are the hidden by default protected Windows system files. the faded "desktop.ini" files in your screenshot are an example of these and like in the screenshot below.

Normally, you wouldn't want these hidden OS files showing to prevent doing something to them by mistake.

Brink said:

The show/hide OS files are the hidden by default protected Windows system files. the faded "desktop.ini" files in your screenshot are an example of these and like in the screenshot below.

Normally, you wouldn't want these hidden OS files showing to prevent doing something to them by mistake.

View attachment 77945

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Thanks Brink, that makes things much easier, I have never used the hide or show OS files even in Win 10 so I won't go there.. but the show hidden files works great now. Those 2 icons that showed up on my desktop I deleted and everything still works fine.. The icons in the above post I was editing while you were replying

When you say Microsoft has gone backward with their Windows 11 i can't agree more.
I have found very little that they have made better, when you have to go through more menus to do what you had been able to do with one, and you find you have to reset items you set once over and over again.
Some might say Microsoft is always moving forward, i would like to know just where forward is taking us.