Archives

Opening an archive (Alt+F5)

Alt+F5 in the file window opens, as a tree and read-only:

• .zip, also .jar, .war and .apk;
• .7z (encrypted 7z archives are not supported);
• .tar, plain or compressed with gzip (.tar.gz, .tgz), xz (.tar.xz, .txz), bzip2 (.tar.bz2, .tbz2) or zstd (.tar.zst).

Navigation, Filespec, Branch, Showall, tags, View, Ctrl+S and Compare work inside it, and Copy (Ctrl+C and Alt+C with paths too) extracts the files. Esc in the tree closes the archive and returns to where you were.

For safety, entries with .. or an absolute path are ignored, and symbolic links inside archives are never extracted.

A compressed TAR has no index, so opening one decompresses all of it. That happens in the background: the footer shows how far it got, Esc cancels, and the rest of Xylem keeps answering; the window changes when it is done. An archive with more than 1,000,000 entries is refused.

Creating an archive (F5 / Ctrl+F5)

Creates a .zip, .tar, .tar.gz or .tgz (according to the name you type) with the current file or the tagged files; F2 picks the folder. The paths inside are relative to the list’s root, as with Alt+C: in a Branch, subfolders are kept. It shows progress and Esc cancels; the file is written to a temporary file and only gets its name at the end. Symbolic links are stored as links. An existing file is not overwritten.