## Changing BetterZip's Appearance

### List Mode

BetterZip has two view modes to display an archive's contents:

- Flat list (⌘1)
  All files and folders are shown in a flat list. If you use this mode, you should display the path column. This mode is useful, if you need to sort the files regardless of their position within the folder hierarchy (e.g., by modification date).
- Outline view (⌘2)
  The files are shown in a tree-like list, like the Finder's column view.

### Font Size

You can increase the font size used in the main window by pressing ⌘+ and decrease it pressing ⌘-.

## Customizing BetterZip — the Preferences

### Tab General

Start with an empty document
Check this option, if BetterZip should open an empty archive window when started. Empty archive windows are reused when you open an archive.

Quit after last window closed
Check this option, if you want BetterZip to quit after you closed the last window.

Default to direct extraction
Instead of displaying the archive's contents, BetterZip can immediately extract it when opened in the Finder. This is called direct extraction. Check this option, if you want direct extraction by default. You can toggle the default behavior by holding down ^⌘ (ctrl+cmd) while opening the archive.

Reset "Don't Ask Me" Warnings
Click this button to have BetterZip display all alert panels again which you dismissed at some time checking the box "Don't show again".

### Tab Helpers

At the moment BetterZip can only use one external helper tool and that is rar which lets you create rar archives. Extraction is built right into BetterZip, so you don't need an external tool for this.

### Tab Cleaning

The Clean function lets you remove certain files from the archive in an automated way. If you use a version control system like CVS or Subversion, you will probably not want to include the hidden CVS and .svn folders in your archives. BetterZip uses search patterns (regular expressions) to find such files and removes them with the click of a button. On this tab you can add new search patterns by clicking the + button below the list or remove patterns you don't want by clicking the - button. Click a pattern in the list to edit it.

BetterZip can filter files at two occasions: before saving and after extracting an archive. Use the checkboxes in this list to set which patterns to use at which occasions.

To learn what regular expressions are and how they work, read this Wikipedia article or search Google for a vast number of tutorials.

### Tab File Types

In this list all file types that BetterZip can handle are displayed. You can choose which types actually to connect with BetterZip. If you select a type, the previous handler will be saved and you can restore it by deselecting the type again.

### Tab Passwords

On this tab you can manage your often used passwords. See the page The Archive Password Manager for more details.

### Tab Advanced

On this tab you can set a few more options:

Concurrent archive operations: When you use the archive operations queue, BetterZip can throttle the number of operations that are executed at the same time. If this value is set to Auto (recommended), Mac OS X will decide how many operations to execute depending on free system resources.

Temporary folder
You can set the temporary folder location. If you frequently create archives from files on disks other than the system disk, setting this folder to reside on the secondary disk will speed up adding files to new archives considerably.

Open unknown file types with
When you view a file of an unknown type, BetterZip will open the file with this application (by default the Finder). If you use a replacement for Finder like Path Finder, you can set this application here. Other possible uses of this setting are hex editors or text editors.