Quick Look Extension

The BetterZip Quick Look extension shows you what’s inside an archive without opening BetterZip. It works wherever you can use Quick Look: in Finder, file open panels, Mail (e.g., to preview attachments). It’s free for everyone, no license needed.

What you see

For supported archives, the preview shows a sortable outline of the archive’s contents. The available columns are Name, Date Modified, Size, Packed, Ratio, Kind, and Attributes. Click a column to sort by it, click again to reverse. The status line at the top shows item count and total uncompressed size, or the size of the current selection.

The format covers what BetterZip itself opens: ZIP, RAR, 7z, TAR (also gzipped, bzipped, xz, zstd, brotli), CAB, CHM, ISO, DEB, RPM, ARJ, LHA, SIT, NSIS, XAR, BinHex, MacBinary, TNEF/winmail.dat, and various comic-book and segmented variants.

The Show hidden items checkbox toggles dot-files and the AppleDouble entries that some archives carry.

Encrypted archives with header encryption can’t be previewed as the extension cannot prompt for a password.

iCloud and other cloud drives

If you preview an archive that lives in iCloud but hasn’t been downloaded yet, the extension by default skips the preview rather than triggering a download. Flip QLDownloadCloudFiles on (defaults write com.macitbetter.betterzip QLDownloadCloudFiles -bool YES) if you’d rather have macOS fetch the file first. Note that Apple’s extension architecture restricts access for some cloud drives (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive) regardless of this setting.

Configuration

Apple removed the option to save settings inside Quick Look extensions, so BetterZip stores them in its own settings instead. See Settings – Extensions for the columns to display, packages-as-folders, hidden files, and the size cutoff for tar archives.