1. Historically it used to contain a bunch of blank file types, including .txt files.
2. Now it only has a Folder, Shortcut, WinRAR archive. That's right, only three items. This has to be a bug.
Yes. I've used 7-Zip some, earlier, and found it to be quite good. IIRC, from both command-line and GUI.
It's a very solid archival program. I wouldn't recommend that everyone runs out and buys it, and I use 7zip more than Winrar, but it does have some advantages, especially on Windows.
Like the one that 7zip has AES256 encryption and WinRar can't open it, that one?
In windows, when you extract a zip file that contains japanese characters, they get 'garbled', which can cause problems if you need to maintain the directory and file names. I tried with 7-Zip as well with the same outcome.
I found a fix on stackoverflow [1] which mentioned using winrar, as it had an option to change the name encoding for archived file names. Using that I was able to extract the zip and the files and directories maintained their original japanese names.
[1] - https://superuser.com/questions/554108/extracting-a-zip-file...
I did not look it very closely so I don't know what exactly infozip was getting incorrect in my case. but I did find this interesting bug report from 2012. Apparently a lot of encoders are sloppy about the spec and will leave header fields zeroed rather than set them. and if infozip reads a header that says the zipfile was created by dos(a zero) it believes it and extracts it using a dos compatible encoding.