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I think it's worth noting that the reason dotfiles are hidden was originally a bug: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RobPikeTheHuman/posts/R58WgWwN9jp https://plus.

• vram22 11y ago
  Yes, saw that a while ago, interesting. Getting to know the reason after years of using Unix, because the info only came out recently (AFAIK) ...
• adrusi 11y ago
  That's not the reason why "dotfiles" are hidden, that's the reason that files whose names begin with dots are hidden. "Dotfile" refers specifically to user-local configuration files, which almost always have filenames that begin with a dot, or are located within a directory whose name begins with a dot. Dotfiles are hidden because some people decided that configuration files ought to be hidden from the user during normal activities and so they took advantage of the originally-a-bug-feature of hidden files. This became the standard practice because at the time there was no agreed-upon location for user-local configuration (as existed for system-level config in the form of /etc), so the most logical thing to do was to just put config files inside $HOME. This clutters up the home directory, and so hiding these configuration files made sense.