BetterZip 6.0 is here
BetterZip 6 Is Here With Lots of New Features
After a long stretch of development, I’m happy to share that BetterZip 6 is ready. And it also happens to land on a nice milestone: I’ve been working on BetterZip since 2006, so this year marks 20 years of the app. Thank you to everyone who has stuck with it along the way.
Refreshed User Interface
The biggest focus this time was making the everyday experience of using BetterZip smoother. I have worked on every part of the user interface, trying to make it nicer and easier to use.
You can now browse archives in Icon View and Columns View, exactly the way you’d move through folders in Finder. There’s also a built-in full-screen image viewer, so if an archive is full of photos or scans, e.g., a comic book, you can flip through them right where they are instead of extracting first.
BetterZip 6 also gets a fresh coat of paint: a modern split-view layout, a tidied-up Settings window, and a light, sensible touch of Apple’s new Liquid Glass design language.
The app icon is new as well. I had grown tired of the clamps and zippers you see on most archiving apps, and I wanted something more organic. BetterZip’s new icon is a kokedama — the Japanese practice of growing a plant on a moss ball wrapped tightly in string. Thanks to Matthew Skiles for designing it so beautifully! Of course, it has all the variants.
Extensive Automation
The other half of this release is about automation. If you like setting things up once and letting your Mac handle the repetitive parts, BetterZip 6 gives you a lot more to work with.
There are now Shortcuts actions and App Intents, so BetterZip can be part of the automations you build in macOS’s Shortcuts app. If you prefer the Terminal, there’s a new command-line helper tool you can install right from the BetterZip menu — handy for scripts and anyone who lives in the shell.
On top of the existing support for shell scripts, Automator workflows, and AppleScript, you can now have BetterZip run a Shortcut automatically after it successfully creates or extracts an archive. It’s a small thing that opens up a lot of possibilities: move the results somewhere, send a notification, kick off the next step, whatever fits your workflow.
If you like to tinker, BetterZip 6 also makes it much easier to add new or less common archive formats — you can even add your own — and to fine-tune the built-in compressors if you want to. And if you don’t want to think about any of that, the defaults just work.
Lots of smaller things, too
A more powerful filtering system lets you build complex filters using criteria such as size and age in addition to name and path. You can also specify a filter on the fly when adding files to an archive.
The new Collect Mode lets you gather files and folders into an archive by copying them to the clipboard in Finder or other apps.
A built-in Spotlight importer indexes the filenames inside your archives, so a file tucked away in an archive can turn up in a normal Spotlight search.
Beyond the headline features, there are dozens of smaller improvements that add up: file-renaming options when you extract or create archives (like tidying up filenames for Windows or swapping underscores for spaces), a redesigned Conflict Resolution window with more control over how conflicts are handled, options to skip empty folders or extract flat, and clearer progress reporting that estimates remaining time and shows up on archives directly in the Finder. Web archives and HTML files preview in a full web view.
There’s also a much better logging system that keeps a separate, persistent log per archive with clickable file paths, adjustable performance and energy settings, and a plugin for the new BetterTouchTool Launcher. And underneath it all, a good deal of internal rework to make everything a little faster and steadier.
BetterZip 6 requires macOS 13.5 or later. Please see the release notes for a complete list of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes.
Give it a try, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think. Thanks!
— Robert