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Tuesday, 30 November 2004

Compress to impress

In my ongoing quest to replace all of my software with free alternatives I recently turned my attention to the venerable WinZip. I was looking for a utility with the following features:



  • shell extension to add and extract (denoted shell)

  • pleasant streamlined graphical user interface (GUI)

  • full command-line interface (CLI)

  • 7-Zip support (the reigning champion in compression)



I gathered the most promising candidates from NoNags and the more discerning Pricelessware list and took them for a test drive.



QuickZip 4.5b11



  • [GUI] non-standard UI - icons in weird places

  • [GUI] after testing an archive, doesn't show the result

  • [GUI] options dialog hideously complicated and over-tabbed

  • [GUI] many poorly-explained extra features

  • [CLI] no command-line operation

  • website is obscure about software functionality



7-Zip 4.12b



  • Open Source (feel-good factor)

  • [GUI] Nice simple interface.

  • [Shell] No right-click explorer menu after dragging (third-party fix available)

  • [Shell] No icon in right-click explorer menu

  • [CLI] Virtually complete command-line interface (similar to WinZip)

  • [CLI] Some command-line options buggy or counterintutive, eg. exclude
    (Aside 2-Dec-2004: the usage may be obtuse, but the author is willing and prompt to respond to queries on the 7-Zip forum)

  • Small.



IZArc 3.4.1.6



  • [GUI] Modern configurable GUI.

  • [GUI] Slight lack of GUI polish.

  • [GUI] Excellent tree view of archives.

  • [CLI] Only basic command-line interface.



TugZip 3.1



  • [GUI] Modern configurable GUI.

  • [GUI] Excellent tree view of archives.

  • Comprehensive scripting language (dissimilar to WinZip, so not useful to people who don't want to learn another language)



ZipGenius 5.11



  • [GUI] Modern GUI, but too fussy and unconfigurable.



As there were no products that completely satisfied my needs, I decided to stick with a combination of two, 7-Zip for its command-line interface, to use in scripts, and either IZArc or TugZip for the GUI and shell extensions. Of those two, IZArc's GUI was less polished, but made more sense to me, so that's my winner.



I was considering switching to using 7-Zip (.7z) archives as my default for backups, but have decided to stick with the old zip format for the moment, because few programs can test .7z archives, and their creation takes much longer than for similarly sized zips.



Finally, I must note my surprise at how much better the interfaces of IZArc (and perhaps these other archivers) is than WinZip 8 (and presumably 9). It's certainly well worth trialling free alternatives before you decide to purchase any software.



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