Purrchiver Help

Welcome to Purrchiver — a clean Mac archive utility. No ads, no subscriptions, no tracking, just a tool that opens, extracts, creates, and edits archives without getting in your way.

This is the same help content that ships in the app’s Help menu (⌘?) and is hosted online at purrchiver.app/help/. Every error message in Purrchiver links here via “Learn more →” when a relevant page exists.

Start here

• Getting started — first launch, the three core concepts, and where everything lives.

Common workflows

• Opening an archive — every way to open an archive in Purrchiver.
• Extracting files — pulling files out of an archive (one file, some files, or everything).
• Creating a new archive — turning files and folders into a .zip, .7z, .tar.gz, or any other supported format.
• Editing an existing archive — adding and removing entries inside an archive you already have (⌘E enters Edit mode).
• Extracting several archives at once — drop a batch of archives, pick one destination, Purrchiver works through them.
• Encrypted archives — creating password-protected archives with AES-256 and opening encrypted ones from others.
• Multi-part archives — .part01.rar + .part02.rar, .r00/.r01/.r02 sequences, .7z.001/.002, etc.

Power features

• Drag and drop — drop targets, drag promises, and every supported gesture.
• Finder integration — the three Purrchiver entries in Finder’s right-click → Services menu.
• Keyboard shortcuts — the full shortcut reference.
• Settings — what each preference does, with sane defaults explained.

Reference

• Format support — the full read/write matrix.
• Legacy & niche formats — what Purrchiver detects but doesn’t extract (ACE, BinHex, MacBinary, LZO, LRZIP, grzip) and what to use instead.

Privacy & security

• Privacy & security — exactly what Purrchiver does and doesn’t do with your data, with verification steps.
• Decompression-bomb safety — the “possible decompression bomb” preflight prompt and the other layered protections.
• Sending crash reports — opt-in only; what gets sent and what doesn’t.
• Diagnostic logs — what Purrchiver logs, how to view it, and how to send a sanitized log to support.

Troubleshooting

• Common errors — what each error message means and how to fix it.
• Disk images (.dmg) — why Purrchiver doesn’t open them and what to use instead.
• StuffIt files (.sit / .sitx) — why Purrchiver doesn’t open them and what to use instead.

Need more help?

Email corey@purrchiver.app. Email goes directly to the developer — there’s no support queue, no chatbot, no auto-responder.