Automatically hide latex aux files in finder (files with a certain extension)

Question

I'm a LaTeX user in OSX. I use TexShop primarily. LaTeX automatically creates lots of helper files with various different extensions (.log, .nav, .aux, .out, etc).

It's almost never necessary to view these, so they add a ton of clutter to the finder folders. Does anyone have a good way of automatically hiding these files in the finder? Specifically, I want to hide all of the files with those extensions automatically. They are created every time I compile, so I need a way either for the finder to ignore them (in the way the windows explorer can treat certain extensions as hidden by default) or for the hidden flag to be set automatically upon creation.

I could actually do this globally if necessary, as my workflow rarely ever gives me cause to invoke or manipulate .log files from the finder. The ideal situation would be to do it only for the folders and sub-folders I use for writing.

Answer 1

I haven't seen a way to do what you ask, but I have seen people make up smart folders to show only specific files in a folder that match the good extensions. Even bending a folder action script to parse files as they are modified would be troublesome since that workflow works best when you move all files out of the folder to ensure they don't get processed in an infinite loop.

Have you rules out configuring latex to put all auxiliary files in a hidden subdirectory/folder that you name with a dot like .tmp? This is shown here for pdflatex -output-directory=\.tmp

Alternatively, you could use a make tool like rubber or latexmk to discard those files when you compile successfully. This means more delay next time the cached files are needed, but keeps things squeaky clean in finder.