Akizip

A modern archive manager for GNOME, built with GTK 4 and libadwaita.

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Akizip is a graphical archive utility for the GNOME desktop, built with GTK 4 and libadwaita. It is distributed as a Flatpak (top.akizip.akizip) and ships with a bundled 7zz binary for handling 7z and other archive formats.

Akizip is a graphical application, not a library — it shells out to the bundled 7zz executable for all archive work, supporting the formats provided by the upstream 7-Zip engine.

• Native GNOME experience — built with GTK 4 and libadwaita, following the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.
• Wide format support — .7z, .zip, .tar, .tar.gz, .gz, .rar (read-only), and many more via the bundled 7-Zip engine.
• Compression and extraction — create new archives or unpack existing ones with progress reporting.
• Archive inspection — view archive metadata and contents without extracting.
• Cancellable, non-blocking jobs — long-running operations run on a background worker thread and can be cancelled at any time.
• Logs panel — a dedicated, dockable window for inspecting command output and diagnostics.
• Multilingual UI — currently ships with English, Simplified Chinese (zh_CN), and Traditional Chinese (zh_HK) translations.
• Sandboxed by default — distributed as a Flatpak with minimal permissions.

Build and install the Flatpak from the manifest:

flatpak-builder --user --install --force-clean build-flatpak top.akizip.akizip.json
flatpak run top.akizip.akizip

You will need meson, ninja, GTK 4 development headers, libadwaita development headers, PyGObject, and gettext.

meson setup build
meson compile -C build
meson test    -C build                              # validates desktop file, AppStream metainfo, GSettings schema
meson install -C build --destdir=/tmp/akizip-stage  # then run /tmp/akizip-stage/usr/local/bin/akizip

The launcher (src/akizip.in, becomes build/src/akizip after configuration) is the canonical entry point. Running python3 -m akizip.main directly from the source tree will not work, because the GResource bundle must be loaded first.

plugins/sevenzip.py hard-codes the bundled binary path at /app/bin/7zz, which only exists inside the Flatpak sandbox. To run on the host, install 7zz to that path (or symlink it), or temporarily edit the SEVENZIP_PATH constant.

Translation work is driven by a small shell script, not by Meson:

./update-po.sh                              # extract strings into po/akizip.pot, msgmerge zh_CN.po and zh_HK.po
msgfmt --check po/zh_CN.po -o /dev/null     # validate a catalog without compiling

po/POTFILES.in lists the inputs. update-po.sh dispatches by extension: Python sources via xgettext --language=Python, .ui files via Glade, and .desktop.in / .metainfo.xml.in via the GNOME ITS file. Strings in .gschema.xml are listed but skipped from extraction (they are translated at runtime by GLib).

To add a new locale, append its code to po/LINGUAS, run ./update-po.sh, and translate the generated .po file.

Translations can also be contributed through Weblate.

akizip/
├── data/                      # AppStream metainfo, .desktop, GSettings schema, icons
├── docs/                      # screenshots and design notes
├── po/                        # translation catalogs
├── src/
│   ├── akizip.in              # entry-point launcher (configured by meson)
│   ├── AkizipApplication.py   # Adw.Application singleton
│   ├── main.py                # process entry
│   ├── job_queue.py           # single-thread background worker
│   ├── window.py / window.ui  # main window
│   ├── plugins/               # state and long-running plugins
│   └── ui/                    # window mixins (logs, info dialog, ...)
├── top.akizip.akizip.json     # Flatpak manifest
├── update-po.sh               # translation pipeline
└── meson.build

• AkizipApplication is an Adw.Application singleton that owns three siblings: app.commands (a "group.action" → callable dictionary), app.job_queue (the background worker), and app.system (a sysop() instance holding the current selection state).
• Immediate plugins (plugins/system.py, plugins/status.py) are plain Python objects called synchronously by the UI. They must not block.
• Long-running plugins (plugins/sevenzip.py, plugins/system_job.py) expose a register(commands) function and submit work through JobQueue. Each callable accepts timeout=-1 and cancel_event=None, polls the cancel event, and respects the deadline.
• The window template lives in src/window.ui and is bundled into a GResource at build time. Mixins in src/ui/ compose the main window — LogPanelMixin owns a separate logs window, InfoDialogMixin builds the archive-info dialog.

For deeper guidance on extending the plugin system, see src/plugins/readme.md.

Akizip is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. See COPYING for the full text.

The bundled 7zz binary is provided by the upstream 7-Zip project (www.7-zip.org). Portions of the software may use code licensed under the GNU LGPL.

• 7-Zip — the open-source archive engine. 7-Zip is a trademark of Igor Pavlov. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by the 7-Zip project.
• GTK and libadwaita — the toolkit and design library. GTK is a trademark of the GNOME Foundation.
• PyGObject — Python bindings for GTK and friends.

GNOME and the GNOME logo are trademarks of the GNOME Foundation.