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Version History

BetterZip 6.0.5 – (for macOS 13.5 and later)

New Features

  • Added an option to trim spaces from the front and end of filenames when saving or extracting.

Enhancements

  • I further reduced memory and CPU usage for Favorites with a very large number of archives and added a limit for the full indexer.
  • Additionally, you can now set per Favorite whether it should be fully indexed, listed one folder at a time when you open it, just be a drop target.
  • Added more options to filtering: You can now do inverse filtering.
  • When closing the window while a huge add operation is still running in the background, BetterZip will now ask whether to cancel the operation, instead of just closing the window. I added similar safety warnings to various other exit points.

Bug Fixes

  • When moving an archive after extraction, the favorites sidebar was not automatically updated.
  • Fixed some localization strings on Settings > Advanced which I inverted in v6, and then forgot to update the translations, like the option “Enable the single-click action”.
  • Added a few more missing localized strings.
  • Icon\r files couldn’t be extracted from zip and 7z archives.
  • Encrypting rar archives without header encryption didn’t work correctly.
  • If the images were advanced too quickly in Slide Show mode, BetterZip could hang, making it unresponsive and hard to quit.
  • Size and date filters did not work correctly when used in a queued operation.

BetterZip 6.0.4 – (for macOS 13.5 and later)

Enhancements

  • Greatly reduced memory usage when working with archives that contain a very large number of items.
  • Greatly reduced memory usage and improved responsiveness of the Favorites sidebar when it scans folders with many archives.
  • The Favorites and Preview menu items now show checkmarks when toggled on.
  • Queued extractions can apply a conflict resolution to all archives in the queue.
  • Added a “high” compression option to the AppleScript dictionary to exactly match the options in the UI.

Bug Fixes

  • Invalid regular expressions in filter patterns could lead to a crash.
  • Under certain rare circumstances, BetterZip would not be able to open zip files at all.
  • Fixed a crash when saving with a tar.gz preset.
  • Fixed a crash when a btrzp:// URL or a programmatic open/extract named a file that doesn’t exist. Such entries are now skipped and the rest of the batch still processes.
  • Fixed symbolic links being stored as full copies in 7z archives when the compression level came from AppleScript’s “best” (or any level the format doesn’t define). The 7z “Best (solid)” level is now simply called “Best” (solid is the 7z default anyway).
  • Fixed “Move originals to” leaving the compressed folder behind when “Don’t include the single root folder in the archive” is checked. Name conflicts in the move destination now get numbered suffixes instead of silently failing.
  • Fixed an extraction silently failing when a password wasn’t entered correctly or the password was not the first in the password manager.
  • Fixed a permission error when extracting directly into the root of an external disk with the “Never create an extra folder” preset option.
  • Fixed the sidebars forgetting whether they were open or collapsed last time.
  • Fixed a leftover divider line after resizing the window.
  • Fixed the Dropzone actions failing for file names containing spaces and for presets with non-ASCII names. Please reinstall the actions to get the fix.
  • Fixed the Alfred workflows ignoring presets with non-ASCII names; also updated them to the new BetterZip 6 icon. Please reinstall the workflows to get the fix.
  • Restored the missing icon for newly installed Dropzone and LaunchBar actions.

BetterZip 6.0.2 – (for macOS 13.5 and later)

Enhancements

  • The info area in the right sidebar can now be hidden (through the View menu) to maximize the space for the preview.
  • Added sorting to the tables on the tabs “Helpers”, “Filtering”, “Archive Types” in the Settings window.
  • When trying to clear BetterZip’s handling of an archive type in Settings > Archive Types, you will now be able to choose an app, if no other app declared being able to handle that type. Sounds complicated, I know: If you uncheck RPM files in the Archive Types table, and you don’t have any other app on your system that declares it can handle rpm files, BetterZip will now show an app chooser, so you can force e.g. HexFiend to handle RPM files from now on. Similar to the Get Info panel in Finder.
  • You really need your zipper box? Fine, check out BetterZip > Settings > Advanced.
  • Enhanced the document icons a little bit.

Bug Fixes

  • When enabling the Finder extension, external drives would be stamped with BetterZip’s icon. This is a bug or weird design decision by Apple, but I found a work-around. If that doesn’t help on your Mac, you can as a fall-back disable running the extension on external drives in BetterZip > Settings > Extensions > Finder.
  • The two radio buttons on the Welcome screen weren’t mutually exclusive.
  • Under some circumstances, new archive windows would be opened with an incorrect size, e.g., reduced height.
  • On older versions of macOS, the Hashes drop-down box in the right sidebar was cut off at the top.
  • On older versions of macOS, the right sidebar’s divider line would go through the toolbar like on macOS 26. The solution is not perfect, but at least there are no visual artifacts anymore.
  • The Favorites scanner no longer restarts intermittently when changes happen on disk, but finishes and integrates the changes once done.
  • Modifying and saving an archive would keep the original modification date instead of setting it to the current time.
  • Help > Get in touch by e-mail led to an unknown web page. It now opens a new email again.
  • Under certain circumstances BetterZip couldn’t open archives in folders that contained an asterisk *.

BetterZip 6.0.1 – (for macOS 13.5 and later)

New Features

  • Added Traditional Chinese localization. Thank you, Jimmy Lin!

Enhancements

  • When an update comes with changes to format definitions, the old format definition is backed up and a note with a link to the backup is logged in the transcript window.
  • The Share extension now can compress multiple items. Previously this was limited to one at a time.

Bug Fixes

  • Zip and 7z in BetterZip 6.0 would not preserve symbolic links, instead packing the original files. This could, e.g., break apps since they usually contain symbolic links. If you packed an app with BetterZip 6 yesterday, please re-pack.
  • The position of the Settings window on screen was not correctly saved and restored.

BetterZip 6.0 – (for macOS 13.5 and later)

New Key Features

  • You can now browse your archives in icon view and in columns view, just like you know it from Finder.
  • Full-screen image viewer.
  • Facelift: new icon, modern split view, reorganized settings window.
  • The new Collect Mode lets you collect files and folders into an archive by copying them to the clipboard in Finder or other apps.
  • Standard paste function: Copy files in Finder, paste them in BetterZip to add them to the current folder.
  • BetterZip 6 adds Shortcuts actions and App Intents to macOS.
  • BetterZip got a little helper tool to initiate some of BetterZip’s functionality from the command-line. Install it through the BetterZip menu.
  • Introducing a more powerful way to filter files and folders going into and coming out of archives. BetterZip 6 lets you build complex filters including criteria like size and age in addition to name and path. And you can specify a filter on the fly when adding files to an archive.
  • Easier addition of new or more obscure formats. In fact this can be done by you. At the same time, this lets you configure even more parameters of the built-in compressors and decompressors. But you don’t have to.
  • BetterZip now includes a Spotlight importer, letting you index the filenames inside of the supported archive formats.

More New Features

  • More post processing options: In addition to shell scripts, Automator workflows and AppleScript scripts, run a shortcut after successful archive creation or extraction.
  • Added options to do some common file renaming operations when extracting or creating archives, e.g., sanitizing filenames for better compatibility with Windows or replacing _ with spaces.
  • BetterZip 6 can create and compare hashes for archives.
  • When BetterZip runs into file conflicts while adding or extracting files, the new ‘Conflict Resolution’ window steps in — cleaner and more capable than before, whichever way you like to work.
  • Configure how conflicts should be resolved when adding items to an archive.
  • Added option to exclude empty folders when extracting.
  • Added option to extract flat, without folder structure.
  • Added some useful options and loading and saving presets in the “choose destination” panel of the default extract action.
  • Better logging system: Logging is split by archive and is not lost when quitting BetterZip. Most file paths in the logs are now clickable links giving you quick access to previously added or extracted files.
  • BetterZip now supports rar’s creation of recovery volumes (.rev) and adding recovery records to archives.
  • You can now set the performance/energy consumption.
  • BetterZip now has a plugin for the new BetterTouchTool Launcher that lets you choose one of your BetterZip presets in the launcher to compress or extract the selected files.

Enhancements

  • The progress window now shows the estimated remaining time for lengthy operations.
  • Progress reporting now learns and gets more accurate over time.
  • Progress indicators on archives being compressed and items being extracted in Finder.
  • Most blocking panels and sheets (e.g., for passwords) are no longer blocking other parts of BetterZip.
  • Added a Help menu item to reveal the settings file. This lets you easily bring all your BetterZip settings to another Mac.
  • Removed the fiddly default preset configuration in favor of a simple default checkbox in the preset configuration.
  • All text fields that are supposed to hold paths of files or folders (scripts, helpers, …) now allow you to drag and drop items from Finder.
  • Enhanced the keyboard navigation in the main window, including two new commands to cycle between the three main panes.
  • Added Option+Arrow shortcuts to horizontally scroll the main view.
  • Allow cursor movement and text selection with the keyboard in the preview text view, and added the standard cmd+c keyboard shortcut to copy the selected text.
  • Added an option to hide empty folders.
  • Added an option to hide the path bar.
  • The path bar now has navigation buttons to jump back and forward in navigation history, like Finder.
  • Added the latest versions of the external helper tools, which bring one or more of: enhanced speed, higher compression rates, better stability.
  • You can now import and export presets.
  • Archives can now be renamed from the window’s titlebar.
  • You can now set line wrapping and font on a per-file-type basis for the preview of text files.
  • Webarchives and HTML files can now be previewed in a full web view.
  • BetterZip will now detect changes in file packages (e.g., rtfd - RTF files with attachments) that you extracted with the View command and give you the option to save all the changes in the package back, including added and removed files. And all changes are detected using checksums.
  • BetterZip now displays a warning before cancelling operations running for more than a minute.
  • You can now create extraction presets through AppleScript. Previously only save presets were supported.
  • Extended the AppleScript commands to support the new user-extendable formats and format capabilities.
  • Added more fields to the info area in the right sidebar.
  • You can now cycle through the tabs of the settings window using Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab.
  • Items in an archive that are symlinks now have the link overlay on their icons.
  • BetterZip will handle malformed zip archives with backslashes as path separators gracefully.
  • Tweaked drag/select behavior again to more closely mimic Finder.

Finder Extension

  • Added an option to have a simpler version of the BetterZip Finder extension in the contextual menu.
  • Added an option to not show the “additional action” in the contextual menu.
  • Added a menu item to start Collect Mode (see above) with a new archive.
  • Added an option to not discern file types and always show all presets.

Bug Fixes

  • When showing archives in flat list view, BetterZip would sometimes crash after saving an archive.
  • When changing formats in the save panel, the filename extension wasn’t always changed correctly.
  • “Default to direct extract” no longer activates when opening an archive from the “Open recent” menu.
  • Some downloaded files could have Unicode character encoding variants that couldn’t be extracted without first renaming them. This problem was very strange and has been fixed.
  • “Simple” compressed files (GZip, BZip2…) would display 0 for the uncompressed size when in fact this is an unknown value. BetterZip now displays “—”.
  • Deleting all presets could lead to a crash.
  • BetterZip now preserves metadata (e.g., tags/labels) when re-saving archives.
  • Running multiple rar extractions at once could lead to a crash.
  • Extracting files that were previously previewed didn’t work more than once.
  • Limited thread count on SMB shared folder to 1 for better stability.
  • Fixed the synchronous scripting commands archive, unarchive, and test.
  • Fixed a possible crash when opening an archive from the sidebar while another opening operation in the same window was still in progress.

Older versions: BetterZip 5, BetterZip 4, BetterZip 3, BetterZip 2, BetterZip 1