Comment 59 for bug 39376

Mostly in response to #48: Presenting a view of the filesystem that facilitates easy file management is the role of a file manager. A flexible mechanism to ignore a particular set of files helps out in this ares considerably. Whenever I launch konqueror to organize a directory I must first delete all of the stupid files (for me this is more than just backups, LaTeX generates a large number of auxiliary files that just clutter up the view). Disk is cheap, cleaning out these auto-generated files every time I want to organize my content is annoying and gets in the way of doing actual work.

To me, both supporting the existing .hidden approach and a configurable list of globally applied "backup" patterns (or globs) [I would vote for a separate "[X] Show backup files" menu item, but would be nearly as satisfied if they were all lumped together as "hidden" files] meet an appropriate expectation level for power users and could be made sufficiently obscure to avoid annoying individuals who do not want this feature. A general "filter contexts" submenu would be a nice general solution, but that is probably over the top and would get in the way of users who are not interested in using it so I am not pushing for that.

In summary: Several of the commenters here were interested in hiding non-backup files. Even if all application developers could be convinced to make their backup files dotfiles, this bug would not be fully resolved since that would not cover all of the desired usage patterns. It is useful and appropriate for a file manager to implement a feature that cleans up the user's view of the filesystem. Perhaps a better title for this bug is "Option to hide clutter as well as dotfiles".

Thanks for listening to my rant.