What is Reddit's opinion of PeaZip?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

No problem. See the ".rar" extension at the end of the file name? That means it is a zipped file. Zipped means it is compressed to save space, or that it is several files grouped into one zip, then compressed in order to traverse the Internet as one file (and to save space). Zipped files will mostly have [.rar], [.7z], or [.zip] extensions. There are others, but they are more advanced. You'll come across those with more practice under your belt.

There are several FREE software applications available to unzip zipped files. WinRAR is one example, but I prefer PeaZip because it is Open Source, low impact, and user-friendly (IMO).

In order to open a .RAR file, you need to download and install one of these file unzipper programs first. This will "Extract" the file into all its parts. Read the screen carefully. In general, you should use "Extract into new folder", because that is going to help keep all the files together in a folder under the original file name.

Does all that make sense?

I saw .tar on linux, but not .zst. Quick googling provide how to open in windows https://peazip.github.io/zstandard-compression-utility.html But I don't know why is compressed this way. Did you download from safe source?

Could use PeaZip - basically it's encrypted archives (ZIP etc), but the GUI can be used to extract, view and add files as needed. Not as fluidic as a LUKS container, but, is viable. Anything where a file manager can engage with an encrypted archive should suffice without root.

PeaZip should be able to open this on Windows: https://peazip.github.io/peazip-64bit.html

When you open the archive using PeaZip, it will say that the archive contains a single empty file. Ignore this and hit "Extract", and then hit "Ok" to confirm the extraction.

Short answer, PeaZip uses system's default text color, so it is not possible to change the text colors arbitrarily. System should pass an appropriate text color value.

Long answer:

In an ideal case when the system is set in dark mode the system's default text color will be set to white, or some light color, and it will be applied consistently on all elements of the widget set, see in example PeaZip on macOS in dark mode.

This work quite consistently also on various Linux DE, even if there are exceptions I'm trying to understand better.

Windows is on the opposite end: dark mode pass - by design - light mode colors to Win32 apps. It is possible to set Windows to high contrast mode to pass correct colors to Win32 apps, but it needs - by design - to be set separately, and passes - by design - colors which are a bit different from those of the "real" dark mode so the look and feel does not really matches native "modern" apps in dark mode.

To avoid all of that using arbitrary text color is quite difficult to accomplish: text rendering is handled differently in different elements of the widget set (text in forms, text in buttons, text in the listview and in the treeview, text of menus, etc), and on top of that for each of those special cases each supported platform (Linux, macOS, and Windows) will behave differently.

Rewriting all of those components (on all platforms) will be an huge task, and would come at a cost in term of stability and performances compared to native components.

PeaZip is top notch on Windows but for Linux, it doesn't seem to integrate with KDE at all like it does on Windows and whatever KDE ships with seems to work fine anyway. It's worth a look.

I was literally just pasting this:-

https://peazip.github.io/

PeaZip is an Open Source (LGPLv3) cross platform archive manager software, providing strong file encryption and compression functions, which open and extract over 200 archive types including mainstream formats like 7Z / XZ / TXZ, ACE (*), BZ2 / TBZ, Brotli BR, GZ / TGZ, ISO, RAR, TAR, WIM, ZIP, ZIPX, ZPAQ, Zstandard ZST and more.

Hi, the last version of PeaZip compiles and run on Darwin / macOS, https://peazip.github.io/peazip-macos.html

Being the very first release I packaged for macOS, I marked it as experimental because it sure needs more real-world usage feedback. You can try if it fits your needs.

Ok. The .MDB files would usually be databases that you can open with Microsoft Access if you have that program. The contents might reveal what's going on or how to translate car make model year into the filename you actually want.

The .ARC files are interesting. You might need a program like this to see what is inside them

https://peazip.github.io/arc-files-utility.html

> Can the Peazip format (.pea) be implemented (library?) without the Manager, or is it heavily dependent on it? Seems to me mostly comparable to 7-Zip for Windows, UI with Format and support for other formats?

There seems to be a pea cli tool and the format itself is documented here:
https://peazip.github.io/pea-archiving-utility.html

That's okay I guess, but you can still use 7z to extract RAR files. It's the creation (archiving files into the RAR format) of RAR files that has licensing limitations.

Here's an interesting thing tho, the rar.exe file in C:\Program Files\WinRAR is what is used to create the RAR archives. If you have WinRAR installed you can use Peazip (LGPL v3) to extract AND create RAR archives.

The obvious benefit here is that Peazip offers support for WAY more archival format and you can still use it to create and extract RAR archives.

Hello, in release 8.0, published today, there are two updates which may be interesting for you:

- new option in password dialog "Force typing password interactively" will switch PeaZip to use console to launch backend binaries; in console now you will be able to type the password without anything being passed from one process to another, which is helpful in aforementioned security cases. Also, with this option enable you can generate scripts which will require users to enter password interactively rather tahn running unattended, so can be used in an environment where you cannot trust to save the password in the script, nor to have it in console history (or task manager).

- PEA was updated to 1.01; it does no longer flashes the GUI when run in hidden mode. Also, with hidden_report or batch_report modes it will save a detailed log of the operation without asking for user interaction. The new version will also provide meaningful exit codes so it is easier to integrate with other applications and scripts. You can find all details about PEA 1.01 at https://peazip.github.io/pea_help.pdf (parameters are described at page 18).

You can find the list of commands for pea in the pdf help file https://peazip.github.io/pea_help.pdf

After PEA format specs you can find the list of commands starting at page 17.

Pea was written as graphic application rather than as console application so it can be hidden, but (at present level of development) the GUI cannot be completely removed.

Downloading multi-part archives is very common for large files. It's not like there is any install going on unless I misunderstood what you are doing. They are just unzipping an archive to a folder and running things from there.

I'm not sure how to accomplish this any other way unless you happen to find a compression algorithm that gets you under 4GB for everything.

If you want only one file and want it to be an EXE, by definition it will have to be smaller than 4GB as per your requirements otherwise you must have multiple files. Am I missing something?

If you just want maximum compression, you may need to play with formats.

https://peazip.github.io/file-compression-performances.html#how_data_compression_works

Pure compression and decompression times are very similar, here you can find a benchmark on standard compression corpora https://peazip.github.io/peazip-compression-benchmark.html ; drag and drop extraction can even be noticeably faster, because of an optimized implementation not copying the data to system's temp first.

Where PeaZip is slower is browsing archives containing a very large number of files, because when it opens the archive it performs a thorough check of the entire content (so the user can be warned before starting any other operation on the archive).

The check is almost instantaneous for archives in the range of a few thousands files or less, but can take a few seconds - on an average machine - for very large archives (eg containing around 100K files) which is noticeably slower than 7-Zip or WinRar that always opens instantaneously.

This check can be turned off from Options > Settings > General, setting browser mode to Fastest.

Thank you for the appreciation! IMHO 7-Zip GUI has its own advantages and disadvantages, it is very simple and straightforward while in PeaZip I tried to pack different tools I felt missing in 7-Zip and other archivers - one of the reasons driving me to start PeaZip project.

As for the speed, you can find here a series of benchmarks for compression and extraction, but regarding GUI speed I can agree PeaZip is (still) not as snappy as other archivers: the main reason is PeaZip performs, by design, a quick test on the entire archive before displaying it for browsing, in order to warn user of potential issues - which can hint for damaged or forged archive that should not be trusted for extraction.

That check can be slow for large archives; Options > Settings > Browser switch can fine tune this behavior, with "fastest" setting switching off all test on archive content.

https://peazip.github.io/ has had PAQ as an option. But if you kept the tooling with your archive, you wouldn't lose access to your data IMO.

I wonder if the CPUs are good enough now vs 10-15 years ago to revisit this stuff?

What is it that you mean by "rar packing"? If you mean ability to create a rar archive, then yes, I would agree, on the basis that the algorithm used to produce a rar archive is proprietary and is therefore unable to be replicated in other software. I would argue, that this is actually severe disadvantage, as for example, rar archives were unable to be created on the linux platform:

> RAR extension designates a popular archive format introduced by RarLab's program WinRAR (shareware file archiving utility, free for 40 days) for Microsoft Windows platform; the software was ported to Linux (only as extractor) by the same Author, Eugene Roshal. Initial application release dates back to 1995, last RAR5 standard revision is from 2013. source

"rar packing" isn't exactly a feature in and of itself. its a method for delivering a feature. To that extent, 7zip offers much more preformative methods to achieve the same result, by use of multiple, configurable compression algorithms and archiving formats, using configurable dictionary and word sizes. Not to mention that LZMA offers both multi threading, better compression ratios, and is open source.

Honestly, why people still use the rar format is beyond me.