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Windows integration

The File Explorer context menu and the Windows installer.

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On Windows, Arca plugs into File Explorer so you can open and extract archives without touching a terminal.

Explorer context menu

windows/ holds the Explorer extension, in both flavours:

MenuBuilt on
Modern Windows 11 menuIExplorerCommand plus a sparse MSIX package
Classic menu (Show more options)IContextMenu plus registry keys

Both target Windows 11. The .7z integration needs Windows runtime verification separately from Linux shell checks.

Progress, not silence

Right-clicking an archive opens the Arca window with a progress bar rather than running the command line with no console. An extraction that fails, or that finds a file already there, says so instead of doing nothing.

Installer

The installer is produced with Inno Setup from windows/arca.iss. Download arca-setup-<version>-x86_64.exe from the latest release, or read windows/README.md for building it yourself.

The installer registers .7z alongside ZIP/TAR/gzip for Open With and default-app selection. Explorer recognizes .7z for Open/Extract and strips its extension for the destination folder. Add to archive creates a new archive containing the selection; it does not mutate the selected 7z. The creation dialog offers 7z.

Why it lives outside the workspace

windows/arca-shell needs COM, and therefore unsafe, and only compiles on Windows. It’s excluded from the Cargo workspace so that cargo build keeps working on Linux and macOS.