This is a note to self, where I'll find it, to switch from using 7-Zip to using NanaZip for Windows.
Brief history of zip files in Windows
Back in the era of Windows 98 / Windows 2000 (let's not mention Windows ME), Windows had no native handling of .zip files. So you had to install software to compress and decompress files. I used one called WinZip, popular at the time. It was either not free, or was nagware, I forget, but it ended up costing $29 of real money back in 1999.
It's still around. And still not free. It's now £31.14 per licence. Why do people still buy it?
With Windows 7 (I think), Windows explorer integrated unpacking archive files. Double click on a .zip file to browse it as if it were a folder. Right click to choose "Extract All".
7-Zip
7-Zip launched in 2003, a free and open-source archive manager for Windows. It's hosted on SourceForge (be careful, sometimes I've found releases from there bundled with optional unwanted software, so don't just click through all the defaults in the installer).
7-Zip introduced context-menu integration that was more sophisticated than Windows Explorer, and also better than WinZip offered. You could right-click on an archive and choose to extract it to the current folder or to a new subfolder named after the .zip filename. You could also run various checksum tests, and other tools.
For years, 7-Zip was on my standard list of software to install on any Windows 10 system I was setting up.
Enter Windows 11
I'm just having my first experience of Windows 11. There's lots to like, and some things not to like, but let's not get sidetracked reviewing it.
One of the things they've added is an overhauled context menu in Windows Explorer.
You can still get the old menu back by clicking "Show more options". Shift+RightClick still gets you the old context menu straight away if you need it, or there's a registry hack involving creating a new key named InprocServer32 to make the old menu the default (search for it if you want that).
The point is that 7-Zip's context-menu, one of its strongest points, is no longer available. You have to remember to use Shift, or an extra click to more options, or switch the system away from the (otherwise pretty cool) context menu.
It turns out that doing this is solvable, but the 7-Zip developer (Igor Pavlov) has chosen not to. However there are a couple of forks of 7-Zip out there that have added this (as well as continuing development).
The one I'm using is hosted in GitHub, called NanaZip. Even easier, their recommended way to install is via the Microsoft Store, so it'll keep itself up to date (something 7-Zip never did), and you won't have any problem telling your computer that an unsigned installer is fine.
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