How to install Winrar on Mac OS X on Console and Graphical Interface – IZIP and Keka Free archivers short review

Friday, 19th February 2016

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If you're looking for just Mac OS X, console version of rar and unrar then standard WinRar website binaries for Mac should be perfect for you.
If you're an advanced Mac OS X user with UNIX background and you've already installed Mac Ports or Brew – The Missing package manager for Mac OS X
To install WinRar on Mac (with brew) with:
 

macosx# brew install unrar


If you're using MacPorts instead:
 

macosx:/home$ sudo port install unrar


However console version isn't the best choice for my wife which is not a console ninja, so I had to look and install some oher Graphic Interface program 🙂
As I don't like using AppleStore (I can't even properly register for an Apple Store ID,as I'm required to fill in my credit card … )
Hence I looked online on some WinRar dearchiver GUIs and  found IZip which is natively a ZIP archiver but also supports .RAR Archives.
Though IZIp website give the impression IZip is a great tiny prog, once installing the .DMG downloaded from the website and installing into Applications it turned out IZip is currently crashing on the Mac Book Air with Mac OS X 10.8.5Mountain Lion

If you want a simplistic interface program you would probably want to check out UnrarX though I personally didin't liked that one because it is not properly handing UTF-8 and CP-1251 filenames written in Russian, Bulgarian Cyrillic and probably also Chineese, Viatnamese and other exotic language encodings.
After few more minutes of searching I finally got KEKA – The Free  Mac OSX file archiver.

keka_winrar-archive-unarchive-free-program-for-macosx-icon

Though the program Logo is a little scary, Keka turned to be very nice tiny, easy  to install WinRAR GUI interfaced program for Mac OS X and the installation comes to standard download and run of .DMG file and moving it to the Finder Applications.

Once installed, if you turn to have a .rar file association issues (by default in my case) files were opened with VLC. To change the file type association of a certain file on the Mac I've had to press Command (button) + I over the .rar extensioned file, e.g:

  • Command + I
  • Click to expand the “Open with” section within that files info screen
  • From the pull down menu, select the application you want to open this specific file with
  • Close the Get Info window
     

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One Response to “How to install Winrar on Mac OS X on Console and Graphical Interface – IZIP and Keka Free archivers short review”

  1. admin says:
    Firefox 44.0 Firefox 44.0 Windows 7 x64 Edition Windows 7 x64 Edition
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    For those who can afford it or prefer even better (from functionality point of view) WinRar / WinZipper for MacOSX check in Apple iStore for Suffit Expanded

    Also another good free software for winrar for Mac OS X I forgot to mention in article is 7Zip

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