The Activity window is Purrchiver’s global job monitor. Every extract and compress job — no matter which window started it, no matter which Space that window is on — shows up as a row here. Open it with Window → Activity or ⌘0.
Same pattern Apple uses for Mail’s Activity Monitor and Safari’s Activity window: one app-wide window that lets you see and cancel in-flight work without going back to whichever window kicked it off.
When it’s empty
The empty state is the resting state. Purrchiver doesn’t run anything in the background, so as soon as your last extract or compress finishes you’ll see this. The tray glyph and caption are the whole UI when nothing is happening.
When there’s work in flight
Each row is one job:
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Job | An icon for the kind of job (down-arrow doc for extract, archive-box for compress), the archive’s display name, and a subline with context — the current entry being processed for an extract (Extracting: src/big/data-3.bin), or the destination for a compress (→ Downloads/output.zip). Long names truncate in the middle so the extension stays visible. |
| Status | The job’s lifecycle state plus, for extracts where the total is known, a determinate progress bar and N/total files count. A relative timestamp (now, 5 min ago) sits below. See the state table for the color semantics. |
| (action) | A right-aligned button that changes with state: Cancel while the job is pending or running, Reveal once the job is done and produced a file Purrchiver can show in Finder. Failed and cancelled rows have no action button. |
The footer always shows the total count (N jobs total) and a Clear
Finished button that drops every terminal row at once. The button
is disabled when there’s nothing terminal to clear.
States
| State | Color | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Queued | secondary (grey) | Waiting its turn behind another running job. Cancel is available. If others are ahead of it, the status shows the position — “Queued — 3 ahead.” |
| Running… | primary (default) | Currently being worked on. When Purrchiver knows the total entry count up front (extract from a loaded session, compress from staging), you get a determinate progress bar and a live 47/312 files counter. For paths where the total isn’t knowable until the job ends (some streaming formats, batch extract), the bar is an indeterminate spinner and the counter shows just the running total. Cancel is available either way. |
| Done | green | Finished successfully — the count shows the final entry total (Done — 8 files). Reveal shows the result in Finder when applicable. |
| Error message | orange | Failed — the row shows the failure message inline (up to two lines, full text on hover). No action button — Clear Finished removes it. |
| Cancelled | secondary (grey) | You hit Cancel before it finished. No action button. |
Purrchiver runs one job at a time per kind to keep ordering predictable and prevent two writers fighting over the same destination folder. That’s why “Queued” exists — submitting four extracts at once runs them sequentially, not in parallel.
Cancelling a job
Click Cancel on the row. For a queued job that hasn’t started, cancellation is instant. For a running job, Purrchiver stops at the next safe boundary (current entry finishes writing, then the rest of the archive is skipped). Any files already written stay on disk — we don’t roll back partial extracts; finding nothing in your destination folder when you cancelled a 90%-done job would be worse than finding the partial result.
What gets cleared
Clear Finished removes every row in a terminal state (Done, Failed, Cancelled). Running and Queued rows are left alone. There’s no confirmation — clearing finished rows doesn’t undo anything, it just empties the visible history.
Purrchiver also self-trims: once you accumulate 100 terminal rows, the oldest get dropped automatically so the table doesn’t grow forever during long sessions.
Dock badge
Purrchiver’s Dock icon shows a badge with the count of non-terminal jobs (Queued + Running). Goes away when everything finishes. No sound, no notification — just the number.
If you turned General → Notifications on, you also get a single silent banner per completed job. The Activity window is the always-on surface; the banner is the optional poke.
What’s deliberately NOT here
- No percentage readout. The progress bar gives the proportion
visually; the running
N/totalcount gives the absolute. A literal73%would be either redundant or — for streams where the total isn’t knowable up front — actively misleading. Indeterminate spinners are honest about that uncertainty. - No pause/resume. Archive jobs are not pausable — pause would require holding open file descriptors, sandbox handles, and encryption keys for an indeterminate time. Cancel + re-run is the pattern.
- No “retry failed” button. Errors are usually permission or disk problems, not transient. Re-open the source archive (or re-stage the compress contents) and start a fresh job — the Activity row’s error message tells you what to fix first.
Related
- Batch extract — the Activity window is the natural place to watch a batch run to completion
- Keyboard shortcuts — ⌘0 is the Activity window
- Settings — General → Notifications toggles the per-job completion banner
- Privacy & security — the Activity window’s count is local-only; Purrchiver never sends job activity off your Mac