Why packwing
- ⚡ Every core at work. Compresses and extracts on all of your computer's cores at once: one 3 GB file zipped in 3.2 seconds, where a single core takes 65.
- 🛡️ Safe by default. Nothing is written outside the folder you chose, archive bombs are stopped, and no file is replaced without asking.
- 📂 Opens what you come across. ZIP, RAR, 7z, tar, ISO and UDF images, Debian and RPM packages, snaps, AppImages, macOS packages and
.age files.
- ✏️ Makes and edits archives. ZIP, 7z and
.tar.gz, .tar.xz, .tar.zst, .tar.bz2, with AES-256. Add, delete and rename inside ZIP and 7z archives.
- 👀 Look before you extract. Search inside an archive, preview its files, and step through its pictures and texts in a full-window viewer.
- ☁️ Your storages, too. Browse S3, WebDAV and SFTP like folders, and open an archive there without downloading it.
- 🔏 Signed and checked. Sign files, verify signatures, and compare checksums with the ones on a download page.
- 🖱️ Right where you are. Compress and Extract in the right-click menu of Finder, Windows Explorer and Linux file managers.
- ⌨️
pkw, the command line. The same engine for terminals, servers and scripts.
- 🏢 Ready for organizations. Policies by Group Policy or a configuration profile, and an audit log of what was extracted and made.
- 🌍 Made for every day. 15 languages, light and dark, and updates you can trust.
Every feature in detail: docs/features.md.
Download
Get packwing at packwing.app, or from the latest release:
| System | |
|---|
| macOS 13 or later | .dmg for Apple silicon and Intel, signed and notarized |
| Windows 10 and 11 | an installer, or a .zip to run from a folder |
| Linux | .deb for Debian and Ubuntu, .rpm for Fedora and openSUSE |
| Command line only | pkw alone, for Linux, macOS and Windows, or brew install hivepaas/tap/pkw |
On macOS, brew install --cask hivepaas/tap/packwing installs the app with Homebrew.
packwing tells you when a new version is out, and installs it when you say so.
Command line
pkw extract backup.7z
pkw create site.tar.zst site/
pkw convert photos.rar photos.tar.zst
Everything pkw does: docs/cli.md.
Build from source
make release
What it needs, the tests and the packages: docs/building.md.
🐝 Made by HivePaaS
packwing is built on hivepack, our Rust library for archives and compressed files. HivePaaS also makes shellwing, a fast native SSH client, tracewing, a native HTTP(S) debugging proxy, authwing, two-factor codes that know the window you are in, context-menu-rs and hivepaas, a self-hosted PaaS.
⭐ If packwing is useful to you, a star on GitHub helps others find it.
License
packwing is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later, with the additional permission that lets it read RAR. The name and logo are not covered by the GPL: see TRADEMARKS.md. Contributions are welcome: see CONTRIBUTING.md. The licenses of what packwing is built with: docs/third-party.md.
Copyright © 2026 HivePaaS.
