geekThang

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.