I am working on a 7z GUI for Linux and I am coming here to share it with you all. This is a work in progress and will be getting a bunch of update over the next couple weeks as I look to publish on Flathub soon.
Right now a lot of it is wired up, and ready to go but needs some features to make it stand out. I will be working on this to get to a comfy state to release then worry about the more fancy stuff over time.
Maybe wait a couple days as I get closer to to publishing fully on Github Pages, but if you are interested in the development take a peek !
Getting closer to release on flathub, I’ve added a cool feature for verifying hashes. Hash Calculator !
You can get the hashes of your archives and also verify those of .iso or archives you’ve downloaded off the internet. CHECKSUM files for iso’s are present for all major distros and it’s just convenient to verify this way.
There are some other nice to have’s here, like “Transparent nested browsing“ & “Transparent nested extract“ setting up .tar files + compression in one go, and multi level view of .tar + .zstd files.
We are LIVE ! Anyone looking to test this application can download the flatpak (auto updating included) from the Github. A Modern 7z ZS GUI for those looking to have more than just command line tool !
Unique password per archive. In batch mode (“create a separate archive for each item”), every archive can get its own random 64-character password. The set is recorded in a passwords file you save wherever you keep secrets.
The passwords file is just a file — readable JSON with one entry per archive: the archive name, what it was made from, the password, its SHA-256, when it was written, and the cipher in plain words (“7z, AES-256, encrypted headers”). Keep it in KeePassXC, Bitwarden, pass, a vault, or a drawer. Septima never talks to a password manager’s API, so all of them work by default.
Optional protection for that file — standard symmetric OpenPGP (gpg -c), so any gpg anywhere can open it: no keys, no keyring, no host access. You choose before the run starts, which is what keeps a protected run from ever writing plaintext to disk. Declining shows a plain-words warning instead of silently leaving secrets next to the archives.
Crash-safe by ordering. Every password is written to disk before the first archive is created, and the file is rewritten atomically as each archive completes. An interrupted run can leave a password with no archive; it can never leave an archive with no password.
Batch decrypt — the other half. Open a passwords file with the Open button, by dropping it on the window, or from the command line, and Septima offers to extract every archive it lists, each with its recorded password, into its own folder. A per-entry picker (with select-all, clear, and a filter once the list gets long) means you can take just the ones you want. Missing archives and empty passwords are skipped loudly, and only basenames are trusted, so a hand-edited path can’t walk out of the folder.
Drag entries out to extract — the missing half of drag and drop. Select rows in an open archive, drag them into Files or any app that accepts files, and they arrive extracted. A directory brings its whole subtree.
For those who have installed a simple flatpak update gets you what you need.
For the Dozens of you who have downloaded and updated this 7Z-ZS GUI app, I present to you a new update ! Yep, I got a lot of bug fixes in and am still hard at work on this tool
A lot of the bugs were in batch handling and those are being fleshed out. I am currently working on a way to use GPG for the password files. (typically used when encrypting multiple 7z/zip files.
Batches now finish quietly — one summary at the end instead of a notice for every archive.
Fixed
One notice per batch. Creating or extracting several archives at once used to raise a notice for each one (two with checksum files on), so a big batch kept scrolling notices long after the work was done. Now it ends with one summary, such as “Extracted 48 archives · 2 failed”, with a Show in Files button.
Problems collected, not interrupting. Anything that went wrong in a batch is listed in one dialog at the end, instead of an error pop-up for each archive mid-run.
One password question for a batch extract. Encrypted archives in a batch are held until the rest finish, then Septima asks once for their password. A wrong password asks again; Cancel skips them.
No password box by default. The batch-extract dialog only shows a password field when you tick “These archives are password-protected”, so a batch of ordinary archives no longer looks like it needs one.
Same-name items no longer collide.photos.zip and photos.7z in one batch extract to photos/ and photos_2/ instead of overwriting each other, and report.txt and report.pdf compress to report.7z and report_2.7z.
Extracting or creating a single archive works exactly as before. You can update through Flatpak update or if you just want the bundle you can download it from the github links below.
Anyone looking to test this application can download the flatpak (auto updating included) from the Github. A Modern 7z ZS GUI for those looking to have more than just command line tool ! 