MacPacker
Opens an archive in a window you can walk through, nested archives included, and drags individual files straight out.
What it does
MacPacker treats an archive as a folder. It lists the contents, previews a file without unpacking the rest, descends into an archive stored inside another archive, and lets a single file be dragged out to the Desktop — the operation macOS itself has never offered, where the alternative is extracting 400 MB to read one README.
It reads past the formats Finder knows: forty-odd archive, disk image and compression formats, which covers the RAR and 7z most of this section exists to handle.
The comparison it invites is 7-Zip’s file manager on Windows, and that is the stated inspiration — but written natively for macOS rather than ported.
Alternative to
| Alternative | Type | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| The Unarchiver | Free | Extracts nearly anything, and only extracts |
| Keka | Open source | Creates archives too, with no browsing inside one |
| PeaZip | Open source | Encryption and creation, through a Qt interface |
| 7-Zip (p7zip) | Open source | The same formats from a shell, nothing to look at |
| BetterZip | Paid | The long-standing commercial answer to this |
Install
brew install --cask macpacker