What’s New in BetterZip 5

Here is a short list of the most important new features and enhancements in this latest version of BetterZip.

BetterZip is a universal app, running natively on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.

Even Better Integration with macOS

• App (Share) Extension to compress files from inside other apps.
• Modern Quick Look Extension to preview the contents of archives in Finder and other apps (macOS 10.15 Catalina and later only – older versions will use the old Quick Look generator which is also included in the app).
• Share from BetterZip to other apps and cloud services.
• BetterZip submenu in Finder’s contextual menu. This is fantastic: Instead of manually adding each preset to the macOS Services menu (which you still can), you can now access all your presets conveniently from a BetterZip submenu of Finder’s contextual menu.
• Drag and Drop modernized: Drag items from an archive directly to other apps, e.g., Transmit. And when you drag items to the Desktop or Finder windows with icon view, the items will (finally!) be placed where you dropped them.
• Added an Automator action for testing archives.
• All Automator actions now report their progress back.

New Formats

• Create the most important flavors of Apple disk images (DMG files).
• Extract and create archives with the Zstandard format (fast and high compression).
• Extract and create archives with the Brotli format (also fast and high compression).
• Open and extract archives with the XIP format.

Places

BetterZip 5 lets you manage your favorite folders and use them as quick extraction targets and as destinations to move your archives to with one button click. Yes, BetterZip now has a “Move archive” command and toolbar button that lets you move the archive to another folder or to the trash.

More Powerful Delete Commands

• Redesigned “Delete with pattern”: Firstly, BetterZip 5 lets you invoke your favorite patterns from the toolbar or menu. Secondly, you can now review which files are going to be deleted and tweak the list before actually deleting anything.
• BetterZip 5 lets you delete all Mac specific files from an archive with a toolbar button click or menu command. And you can purge all empty folders from your archive.

Additional Preset Options

• Instead of only customizing the filename extension in save presets, you can now specify a pattern to automatically generate filenames using fixed text and variables (like date, time, and username).
• The post-processing script in presets can now be an AppleScript script or even an Automator workflow in addition to shell scripts.
• Upon popular demand, save presets now let you move the original files and folders to the trash or any other folder after successful compression. (Limited to direct mode and queued operation.)

Many More New Features and Enhancements

• Added “Test”, “Open in BetterZip window”, and “Add to archive” to BetterZip button in Finder.
• BetterZip can now keep the external rar commandline utility up-to-date and automatically download and install new versions when they are available.
• Added an option to always or never update edited files inside the archive. While at it, I enhanced the updating of edited archive files in general (fewer alerts, keeping track of open files after saving changes back to an archive).
• For added security, BetterZip will now quarantine apps extracted from archives. You can disable this in the preferences.
• The “Replace File” dialog no longer blocks all other operations and you can now quick-look the two files for a last visual check.
• Better handling of Windows zip archives with non-latin character sets.
  • Change the encoding of open archives without reopening them.
  • BetterZip will now ask for the correct encoding, when it cannot be determined automatically.
• The info pane in the preview sidebar now shows more details. When no files are selected, general archive information is displayed.
• Better visibility when errors occur during queued operations, even if you choose to ignore the errors and continue. And the Reveal button in the queue window will open the transcript window in this case.
• Favorites sidebar: Added options to not show archive count badges and to disable file browsing, for users who use it as quick and simple extraction drop target only.
• Enhanced the logic of opening file packages (most importantly apps) with a double click. BetterZip will now only navigate into the package, if the option “File packages are expandable” in the View menu is toggled on. Otherwise it will either extract and open the package or do whatever you specified in Preferences > Files. Holding down the cmd key will toggle the behavior temporarily.
• When previewing an app in an archive, its icon, version, and copyright string are extracted and displayed.
• BetterZip now lets you save all the settings in the save panel as a preset. Use the new gear button for this. Loading presets has been moved to this button as well.
• When quitting BetterZip while archive operations are running, you are asked whether you really want to quit. This warning can be suppressed.
• Password panels allow you to show the entered password, even when not using the password manager.
• Added a command to completely reset the password manager in case you forgot the master password.
• When you load a preset in the save panel that has a password set, you can now use that password or clear it to enter a new one. You also get the chance to set a new password when doing a “save as…” command with an encrypted archive.
• More accurate progress bars for all operations.
• Added a tab for the configuration of default settings for the BetterZip Quick Look Generator in the preferences window. macOS Catalina rendered all other means of remembering settings for QL generators defunct. The QL generator is still free for all (i.e., no BetterZip license required) and free users can also use the app to set default settings without problems.

And there’s even more. Find the complete list of news, enhancements, and bug fixes in the release notes.