TLDR: My current recommendation on this topic is PeaExtractor: https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=2700
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Ideal features
- Drag and drop support, including dragging onto the program icon
- Extracts by default to the same location as the file itself, ideally in a subdirectory if there's more than say 2 files
- Should work with 7z and RAR at the minimum, but BZIP2, ARC, and ZIPX would be great too
- Clear progress bar / time remaining note
Background: after spending years looking for a Mac decompression program that works better than the default tools (finally found Keka and muCommander), now I'm looking for a more Mac-like program for Windows. This is because one of the reasons compression formats like RAR, 7z, and more recently the ZIPX format haven't seen wider usage is that there isn't a dead-simple no-thinking-involved decompression method. They all have a file manager built into them, which is off-putting to non-techies.
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Anticipated question: Don't you already have your answer? Isn't the solution Lupo's Universal Extraction version?
Possibly, but some reasons it might not be ideal:
- Sometimes Universal Extractor will extract files in a very weird way that people will just throw away without further research (beginner users will see the {app} and $NSTALL folders and just assume something broke).
- I'd like to list something in the site Intro that doesn't create confusion between what Universal Extractor does and what we recommend for general decompression.
- Just like the official Universal Extractor program, I don't think Lupo is working on this anymore. An actively developed, dead-simple program is of course ideal.
