Chapter 1 Introduction and Quick Start

1.1 What is WxArc

WxArc is a cross-platform archive manager built with Rust + Slint. It uses a single window with a background-task architecture — compression and extraction run on worker threads, so the interface never freezes. It is completely free software with no licensing tiers, bundles or feature restrictions — every feature is unconditionally available.

Core capabilities:

• 30+ extraction formats: ZIP / RAR (RAR4 and RAR5) / 7Z / the TAR family / GZ / BZ2 / XZ / ZST / macOS PKG / CAB / LZH / Z / UUE / ISO / MSI / DEB / RPM / CPIO / CHM / WIM / NSIS / PyInstaller / Asar / SFX executables / split volumes, and more — see Chapter 7.
• 6 compression formats: ZIP / 7Z / TAR.GZ / TAR.BZ2 / TAR.XZ / TAR.ZST; four compression levels and AES-256 encryption for ZIP and 7Z.
• Tree file table: archive directories unfold into a tree; checking a folder selects the whole subtree, and tri-state checkboxes show partially selected folders.
• Smart extraction: when an archive has a single top-level folder, WxArc extracts in place; otherwise it creates a subfolder named after the archive — no more scattered files.
• Security: path-traversal (Zip Slip) attacks are blocked during extraction; mojibake in legacy ZIP filenames is decoded via a GBK fallback.
• Personalization: 21 interface languages, 42 dark/light themes (following the system or switching on a schedule), font family and size, background images, custom themes, keymap editing.

Due to the RAR licensing terms (the UnRAR license permits decompression only), WxArc supports RAR extraction but does not create RAR archives.

1.2 System requirements

512 MB of memory is enough for smooth operation; disk footprint is about 30 MB.

1.3 Installation

Packages are named like wxarc_<distro>_<version>_<arch>.<ext>:

• deb: sudo dpkg -i wxarc_*.deb
• rpm: sudo rpm -ivh wxarc_*.rpm
• pacman: sudo pacman -U wxarc_*.tar.zst
• apk (Alpine): sudo apk add --allow-untrusted wxarc_*.apk
• tar.gz: unpack and run the included install.sh
• AppImage: chmod +x wxarc_*.AppImage && ./wxarc_*.AppImage
• macOS: open the DMG and drag into “Applications”
• Windows: run the NSIS setup.exe or the MSI installer

The Linux packages also install the file-manager context menu (Nautilus/Caja/Dolphin/Nemo) and the “Open with” association for archive formats — see Chapter 8.

1.4 First launch

Just run wxarc — no configuration needed:

1. The first launch creates the user data directory ~/.wxarc/ (see Chapter 10).
2. Click the toolbar “Open” button (or “File → Open Archive”) and pick an archive; you can also drop an archive straight into the window.
3. Check the entries you want to extract (nothing checked = everything), click “Extract Selected” or “Extract All”, and choose the destination directory.

You can also open from the command line: wxarc -open /path/to/archive.zip.

1.5 Checking for updates

“Help → Check for Updates” contacts the update server; when a new version is found an upgrade dialog appears (with the update notes and one-click hand-off to the updater). Otherwise it reports that you are on the latest version. Network errors are reported as well.