Haven’t thought about that format in ages. Also just made me think of WARP format on Amiga.
In Windows, WinRAR has superior handling of non-unicode filenames/character sets by letting you manually change it.
Many other archivers (including 7zip GUI) will garble filenames that are not stored as unicode or the current system character set. Though if you use 7zip via command line it does have a character encoding switch you can provide (never actually tried it though)
Other reason I still like WinRAR is the ability to boot it to a background/tray process while its doing its thing.
What does paid WinRAR do that 7zip doesn’t? Serious question, no snark intended.
I bought WinRAR before 7zip was particularly common. I see no reason to switch. The compression ratio differences between a .7z and a .rar5 are pretty trivial.
RAR is not going anywhere because Usenet is pretty much all RAR propped up by PAR. Though I don’t think there’s anything stopping PAR working with any data type, they are nonetheless hand and glove. Perhaps RAR is better behaved in corrupted file scenarios, it’s beyond my ken.
PAR is great for backup/redundancy purposes.
Realistically, average users probably have no need to really archive stuff in this manner any more anyway. So it doesn’t really matter what you use if it can extract anything and everything. But if you can’t right-click -> Extract to blah\ straight from the explorer shell with no popups, you have my sympathies.
Edit: I will raise the philanthropist stakes in this thread even higher by saying I’ve donated to Notepad++. A decent amount, too!
I just got used to the UI.
so @fox.ferro and @schurem you don’t notice the v6.0 delay in showing archive contents?
Sorry, should’ve mentioned; I’ve not upgraded. ‘Upgrades’ usually happen when I have to reinstall windows. I’m on 5.71, which dates this install to over a year and half-ish old! Go Microsoft, wow!
I rar-ely use the thing anyway, but just for you… I will upgrade and report my findings.
@rei no appreciable difference whatsoever, either in opening/closing the UI or extracting a 2.5gb rar file of precious photos.
Thanks for checking. Damn. I get a 10+ second delay in hitting enter in Explorer on any .zip/.rar file no matter what size vs 5.9. Right-clicking and extracting right there in the shell has no difference.
Double checked that and, yep, practically instant for me.
Uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled and still a delay bah. Thought it might have been 6.0 install over top of 5.91 that caused it. Back to 5.91 I go to try.
5.91 has the same problem now so it looks like something else. Looks like I’m switching to 7zip now too.
Ok, who read this thread
Video: Feb 12, 2021