Free, Unarchiver is a Nice Partial Alternative to Stuffit

Written on March 20, 2007 by Nick Santilli and 11 people have commented

Every time I download a zip or tar or other compressed file, Stuffit is there to do most of the work for me. And about half of the time I get some annoying error from Stuffit when there doesn’t really seem to be any error. But I use it because it’s what I’ve always used and the creature of habit within demands it.

But I saw the Unarchiver (via CoolOSXApps) the other day, and liked the sound of it. Sure, OS X has the BOMArchiverHelper built-in, but it’s a little restricted in what it’s capable of handling. So having another free alternative to open compressed files is a nice option to have.

What’s your favorite compression/decompression utility? (I like Quicksilver too of course…)

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  1. #1 Adam says:

    The Unarchiver is good, but until it has support for .sitx files, you’re still going to have to have Stuffit loafing around handy.

  2. #2 Dennis says:

    I’ve tried to move to all Unarchiver, but as Adam wrote… .sitx files are the fly in the ointment. Otherwise, Unarchiver is tidy and does the job well for every file format I’ve encountered to date.

  3. #3 Ian says:

    The unarchiver is an awesome application.

    I had a problem with it once. (Can’t remember if it was a zip file) but it didn’t extract with the correct permissions and the application it contained didn’t run. I ended up having to extract it wit the BOMArchiverHelper and all was good.

    If I remember correctly, the application was Flex Builder?

  4. #4 Dave M. says:

    As a recent switcher, I’m a little confused. What are .SITX files? Other than a compressed file specific to Stuffit?

    In all the files I have downloaded from various Mac sites, I have never seen a .SITX file.

    As to the question of the post… I use Unarchiver. Have been using it ever since I found it so many months ago. Works flawlessly for me.

  5. #5 Robert says:

    SITX is just a Stuffit archive. Stuffit used to be really popular because it was the only compression/decompression tool for Mac in the OS9 days. But since around 10.3 (with BOMArchive), we’ve gained ZIP support, and more importantly, compressed DMGs; both of these make up the majority of download files. I almost never see Stuffit archives anymore–which I’m quite happy about.

  6. #6 Honza says:

    If I see some demo software offered in sitx format I refuse to download it, then I go take a look at the competition.

  7. #7 Carl says:

    I bought BetterZip a few weeks ago. This one can also create archives and it displays the files inside before extracting. However, it’s not free.

  8. #8 Cory says:

    I’ve always used Stuffit for everything but rar, generally, because I’m lazy. I use Rar Expander for rar files. It’s ugly, but it’s free and it consistently works well. Whenever Stuffit dies on a zip file, I just use CocoaZip. It’s also free.

  9. #9 casual says:

    does anybody know how i can actually view what’s in the archive rather than extracting it directly (which happens when i open it)?

    thanks…

  10. #10 Honza says:

    Casual, just ctrl-click show info on the zip file… Doesn’t show you everything though.

  11. #11 casual says:

    thanks…

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