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Comment by Eridrus | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft puts so many things behind this flag that you pretty much have to display all system files if you are a power user.

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I've left the system files invisible at least since installing Windows 10, and it hasn't once been a problem. I can't remember if it was always this way, or if it's a recent addition, but there's a separate option for showing hidden files and folders. (With this ticked, system files remain hidden, so this one is a much easier tick to recommend, if you're technically-minded. You get to see %USERPROFILE%\AppData, which you'll probably want, but not stuff like hiberfil.sys and boot.ini, which you need much more rarely.)

Hmm... I'm not too sure about that. Any examples?

Show file extensions is disabled by default. I'll always go in and change that. But I can't think of a time where I've had to go into a system file before.

Totally disagree. I enable it on the rare occasions I need to and disable it immediately after I'm done doing what I need. This happens quite rarely (a few times a year) so, basically: no, I beg to differ.

My experience is that this was arguably true in the NT/9x days, wasn't really true in the XP days, and is quite false with Windows 7 onwards.

What exactly has caused you to need to unhide those files this decade?

Isn't Windows' hosts file located in a system folder? Not that I change it so often anymore, but when I did more web development, it was not uncommon for me to add a line there...

No, the "system32" folder is a normal folder from that perspective, i.e. it does not have the SYSTEM and HIDDEN attributes set.

Same for the "drivers" and "etc" sub-folders.

The registry hives are still system files, and so if you want to edit a particular user's registry, you need to show them.

Hidden files, sure. But system files? I can't see any reason to ever display them.

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