Hacker News Reader

Comment by rf15 | Hacker News Reader

Not that many people care about zstd; I would assume most 7-zip users care about the convenience of the gui.

It's been a long time since I used Windows, but back in the day I used 7-Zip exactly because it could open more or less $anything. That's also why we installed it on many customer computers.

On Linux bsdtar/libarchive gives a similar experience: "tar xf file" works on most things.

7-Zip is like VLC: maybe not the best, but it’s free (speech and beer) and handles almost anything you throw at it. For personal use, I don’t care much about efficient compression either computationally or in terms of storage; I just want “tar, but won’t make a 700 MB blank ISO9660 image take 700 MB”.

Windows 11 has shipped with bsdtar/libarchive for a few years. The gui shell support for archive files was recently changed to use libarchive which has increased the supported archive files which can be opened in the shell.

That's basically me! I really like 7-Zip because it opens most archive formats I have to work with and also the .7z format has pretty good compression for the stuff I want to store longer term.

in fact this is the first time I even hear about it, and I am semi-IT litterate. The prevalence of a compression standard is about how ubiquitous it is. For that one, I would vote "not even on the radar yet".

if by gui u mean the ability to right click a .zip file and unzip it just through the little window that pops up ur totally right. At least that + the unzipping progress bar is what I appreciate 7zip for

That's why 7zip should support it. People care about the convenience of the GUI and we all benefit from better compression being accessible with a nice GUI.

I just hope that the recipient will be able to open the file without too much difficulty. I am willing to sacrifice a few megabytes if necessary.

I use the right click context menu to run 7zip, why would you open a GUI?

That is a GUI!

.. but 7-zip has a pretty terrible GUI?

Hence why PeaZip is so popular, and J-Zip used to be before it was stuffed with adware.

If you're expecting a "mobile first" or similar GUI where most of the screen is dedicated to whitespace, basic features involves 7 or more mouse clicks and for some reason it all gets changed every ~6 months then yes the 7zip GUI is terrible.

Desktop software usability peaked sometime in the late 90s, early 2000s. There's a reason why 7zip still looks like ~2004

When compared to it's contemporaries the 7-zip GUI is noticeably worse. Back in 2004 WinRar and WinZip were both clearly superior.

Not sure what those gui improvments in winrar is. I prefer 7zip over all those for gui too.

You could have taken the 10 seconds to type in "PeaZip GUI" and seen that it is not a mobile interface and it is indeed much nicer than the 7-Zip interface.

Instead you chose to make a useless snarky comment. Be better.

Most people won't use that GUI, but will right click file or folder -> 7-Zip -> Add To ... and it will spit out a file without questions.

Granted Windows 11 has started doing the same for its zip and 7zip compressors.

Same trick goes for opening archives or executables (Installers) as archives.

Let's chat about Windows 11 right-click menu. I'm pretty sure they hid all the application menu extensions to avoid worst-case performance issues.

Exactly it. 3rd parties injecting their extensions harmed performance, which people turn around and blame Microsoft for.

People are really praising microsoft for for all three new "features" and tracking in win 11.

All the GUI I need is right click-> extract here or to folder. And 7zip is doing that nicely.

PeaZip is popular? It seems a lot less tested than 7zip; Last time I tried to use it, it failed to unpack an archive because the password had a quote character or something like that. Never had such crazy issues in 7zip myself.

> .. but 7-zip has a pretty terrible GUI?

Since you're asking, the answer is no. 7-Zip has an efficient and elegant UI.

I find the PeaZip gui to be awful to use. I much prefer the 7-zip gui.

I would never trust PeaZip.

The author updates code in the github repo....by drag and drop file uploads. https://github.com/peazip/PeaZip/commits/sources/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com