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I am looking for a software to handle archives on OS X. I know there are many of them quite easy to find, but none seems to have the most basic feature that most Windows archive applications have: browsing!

I mean, most OS X unarchivers, when they open an archive, they just unzip it... then ask you for target location in the best case.

What I want is something such as WinRAR or 7zip, which is basically an explorer (ie. Finder) that opens archives.

What I want is precisely this! I want to be able to browse any archive without extracting it, opening files directly from the archive and then be able to modify it so that the file is actually modified in the archive. I want to be able to drag'n'drop a file to and from an archive to extract/add it.

Those features are so useful when modifying directly JAR files contents, JAR files MANIFESTs, war webapps conf-files and so on...

Thank you.

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jul 2 '11 at 17:05

6 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

iUnarchive seems to be quite nice. It is available at the App Store.

iUnarchive can be used to preview and extract files from archives. Instead of cluttering the disk with files, you can preview and open files directly from within iUnarchive.

Only files selected for preview and extracted files are actually uncompressed.

Supported archives include zip, rar, 7-zip, tar, gzip, bz2/BZip2, LhA and StuffIt, including password protection for zip, 7-zip, rar and multi part rar.

Edit: Not sure if you looked for a free application. It costs 4 Euro now (I think it was free before).

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This one looks quite promising thank you! – tisek Jul 10 '11 at 20:11
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It's $10 right now! At half the price of the entire Operating System, Mountain Lion, it's not worth it at all. Thanks for the pointer though! – Sid Aug 20 '12 at 23:22
up vote 3 down vote

Springy can do this.

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It's $20 - the same price as the entire Mac OS X Mountain Lion! No way ... – Sid Aug 20 '12 at 23:25
up vote 3 down vote

Zipeg allows you to browse and uncompress a number of formats, but does not allow compressing.

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This one is also free, unlike most other suggestions here. It allows browsing and previewing without permanent extraction. +1! – Szabolcs Nov 1 '12 at 15:59
up vote 2 down vote

Apple actually has an example application called ZipBrowser on their developer site. The direct download is located here. Unfortunately this only works with zip files. The actually app is only 600K so it's nice and small. (Note that ZipBrowser only works on 10.6+)

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up vote 1 down vote

I'd say that you are looking for The Unarchiver. It's free in the Mac Appstore.

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This just extracts the files - not a browser – Mark Jul 2 '11 at 17:46
The developer has recently released 'The Archive Browser' which offers these features. It's $4 in the App Store. – mockman Nov 11 '12 at 3:44
up vote 1 down vote

Stuffit browses at least certain types of archives.

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