I have been looking for a good archive expander for a long time. I like the archives to be expanded to the desktop, and BOMArchiveHelper doesn’t do that. Stuffit Expander can do it, but I find it slow and I don’t need an icon bouncing in the Dock every time I expand something. I want a progress bar too so that rules out the various CLI tools.
I made a ruby script (wrapped with the excellent Platypus) to move files to the desktop, open them with BOMArchiveHelper then move them back1, but it was far from ideal.
Then, I found The Unarchiver and it’s exactly what I was looking for.
- You can choose where to expand the archives.
- It’s fast.
- It’s free.
- It handle a lot of file types2:
- Zip (incl. encrypted archives), 7-zip
- Tar, GZip, BZip2, Compress
- StuffIt (.sit, not .sitx)3
- Rar, Ace
- BinHex and Mac Binary
- Many other more or less obscure formats.
- You can choose which filetypes it will handle, it doesn’t “steal” them all4.
The Unarchiver is a perfect replacement for the OS X built-in BOMArchiveHelper, it does everything better and I can’t see any downside.
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This was better than just moving the expanded files, as BOMArchiveHelper handles duplicates filenames better than I was willing to do. ;) ↩
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“Support for so many formats is achieved by using the libxad unarchiving library.” ↩
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.sitx hasn’t been reverse engineered, AFAIK. ↩
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A lot of applications should provide this feature. ↩
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