Macos – In Snow Leopard, how to make hidden directories visible

NOTE: See (also) a corrected/improved answer in the question itself.

Following solution worked for me:

Open a terminal and backup com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist which you're going to change in a second:

$ cd /System/Library/LaunchDaemons
$ sudo cp com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist{,_bak}

convert binary plist to xml:

$ sudo plutil -convert xml1 com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

and open it with your favorite text editor

$ sudo vim com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

it'll look something like this:

 1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 2 <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
 3 <plist version="1.0">
 4 <dict>
 5     <key>EnableTransactions</key>
 6     <true/>
 7     <key>HopefullyExitsLast</key>
 8     <true/>
 9     <key>Label</key>
10     <string>com.apple.dynamic_pager</string>
11     <key>OnDemand</key>
12     <false/>
13     <key>ProgramArguments</key>
14     <array>
15         <string>/sbin/dynamic_pager</string>
16         <string>-F</string>
17         <string>/private/var/vm/swapfile</string>
18     </array>
19 </dict>
20 </plist>

In line 17 modify /private/var/vm/swapfile (e.g. /Volumes/partition2/swapfile), save and close your editor (":x" will do both in vim).

convert the plist file back to binary:

$ sudo plutil -convert binary1 com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

After rebooting your Mac you should find the swapfiles in the directory you specified.

If you run into any problems you can restore the backup you created in the first step with:

$ cd /System/Library/LaunchDaemons
$ sudo cp com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist{_bak,}

According to the Simple Help discussion Overview: The OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Finder, the scope of the two view options commands is as follows:

• Always Open in xxx View: Applies only to that specific folder.
• Set as Default: Applies to all folders opened in that particular view, meaning that it sets the defaults for that view as opposed to the defaults for that folder. (In my original question, the answer is #1.)

Armed with this knowledge, my problem must stem from old .DS_Store files in some folders as to why in certain folders the text size deviates from my default 10 point default.

Deleting .DS_Store Recursively in Folders

My frustration and confusion from seeing folders open not using my defaults appears to have stemmed from old .DS_Store files from folders that I had copied over from an older machine. To resolve, I recursively deleted the folders as follows using Terminal:

cd ~/Folder with bad views
sudo find . -name ".DS_Store" -depth -exec rm {} \;

Kudos to the Adobe TechNote Removing .DS_Store files on Macintosh OS X? for providing this command to delete recursively.