New Key Features

• Icon view and Columns view. Browse your archives the way you browse the rest of macOS. Pick the view that fits the archive instead of squinting at a flat list. Read more →
• Slideshow. Step through every image in an archive full-screen without extracting first – arrow keys to navigate, zoom and pan with the keyboard. Read more →
• A facelift. New icon, modern split view, reorganized Settings window.
• Powerful filtering. Build filters with size, age, name, and path criteria, save them, or define one on the fly while adding files. Read more →
• User-extensible formats. Add new or obscure formats yourself, and tune the parameters of the built-in compressors. You don’t have to – but you can. Read more →
• Collect Mode. Copy files in Finder (or anywhere) to automatically collect them into a BetterZip archive. Read more →
• Shortcuts and App Intents. BetterZip includes actions for the macOS Shortcuts app, with App Intents that show up where Apple’s automation system expects them. Read more →
• Command-line helper. Install a small helper from the BetterZip menu and drive compression and extraction from Terminal. Read more →
• Spotlight importer. Index the filenames inside supported archives so they show up in Spotlight searches. Read more →

More New Features

• Run a Shortcut after archive creation or extraction: in addition to the existing shell, Automator, and AppleScript options.
• Common file-renaming operations on extract or save: sanitize filenames for Windows, replace underscores with spaces, and similar.
• Compute and compare hashes for archives and the files inside them. Read more →
• The redesigned Conflict Resolution window steps in when files would clash: cleaner and more capable than the old one. Read more →
• Configure how conflicts are resolved when adding items to an archive (skip, overwrite, ask, etc.).
• Option to exclude empty folders when extracting.
• Option to extract flat: without the folder structure.
• Save and load presets directly from the Choose Destination panel of the default extract action.
• A better logging system: per-archive logs that survive across restarts, with most file paths rendered as clickable links.
• RAR recovery volumes (.rev) and recovery records can now be created.
• Set the performance/energy-consumption balance for compression and extraction. Read more →

Enhancements

• Progress window now shows estimated remaining time for lengthy operations.
• Progress reporting learns from past runs and gets more accurate over time.
• Progress indicators on archives being compressed and items being extracted in Finder.
• Most blocking panels and sheets (passwords, prompts) no longer block other parts of BetterZip.
• New Help menu item to reveal the settings file: handy for moving your setup to another Mac.
• The fiddly default-preset dialog is gone. There’s a simple “Default” checkbox in each preset now.
• Path fields for scripts and helpers accept Finder drag-and-drop.
• Enhanced keyboard navigation, including two new commands to cycle between the three main panes.
• Option+Arrow scrolls horizontally in the main view.
• Cursor movement, text selection, and Cmd+C copy in the text preview.
• Optional hide-empty-folders and hide-path-bar.
• The path bar now has back/forward buttons, like Finder.
• Updated external helper tools: faster, smaller, more stable.
• Import and export presets.
• Rename archives directly from the title bar.
• Per-file-type line wrapping and font for text previews.
• Web archives and HTML files preview in a full web view.
• File packages (.rtfd, etc.) extracted with View are watched for changes – including added and removed files – and BetterZip can save those changes back. All detected via checksums.
• A confirmation prompt before cancelling operations that have been running for more than a minute.
• AppleScript can now create extraction presets (previously only save presets).
• AppleScript also covers user-extensible formats and the new format capabilities.
• More fields in the right-sidebar info area.
• Cycle through Settings tabs with Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab.

Finder Extension

• Optional simpler version of the BetterZip contextual-menu entry.
• Option to hide the “additional action” item.
• Collect-Mode entry to start a new archive directly from Finder.
• Option to ignore file types and always show all presets.

Bug Fixes

See the version history for the full list.

• Fixed an occasional crash after saving an archive shown in flat-list view.
• Fixed the filename extension not always updating when changing formats in the save panel.
• “Default to direct extract” no longer triggers from Open Recent.
• Strange Unicode encoding variants in downloaded files now extract reliably.
• GZip/BZip2 single-file archives display “–” for unknown uncompressed sizes instead of 0.
• Fixed a crash when deleting all presets.
• Archive metadata (tags, labels) is now preserved when re-saving.
• Fixed a crash during multiple simultaneous RAR extractions.
• Files previewed once can now be extracted reliably afterwards.
• Thread count is capped at 1 on SMB shared volumes for stability.
• The synchronous AppleScript commands archive, unarchive, and test work again.
• Fixed a crash when opening an archive from the sidebar while another open was still in progress.

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