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

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.

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/