The Unarchiver 2.6

The Unarchiver is a free archive decompression tool. It is currently my "unpackager" of choice because it is incredibly easy to use and it seems to support every format out there.

The Unarchiver was one of the first apps that I installed when I made my switch from Windows to Mac. And, although it took me a while to make the transition from WinRAR to The Unarchiver, now I couldn't live without it. The application doesn't have a user interface per se. When you double-click on a package or archive, The Unarchiver doesn't mess around; it starts decompressing the file automatically. It will show a progress window, but that is all you will see as an interface in common sense. If you venture into the application settings, there are a few settings you can change.

I have The Unarchiver configured so that it deletes the original package or archive after decompression and so it extracts the compressed file or files in the same folder were the archive was. This saves a lot of time for me, and I can always go to the Trash and recover the archive if I want to restore it.

The Unarchiver is as fast as any other decompression tool out there. 350-megabyte files decompress in under 10 seconds on my MacBook Pro. It has never crashed for me and there have been only a few instances in which it couldn't handle a file.