Trove:
open any archive.
Make zips in a click.

Windows opens a ZIP on its own. Then someone sends a RAR, a 7Z or a TAR.GZ, and you're off looking for a tool, often one that hasn't changed its look in many years.

Trove is the archive manager I wanted on my own PC: it opens nearly any archive, lets you look inside it like a folder in File Explorer, and turns the most common job, put these files in a zip, into one click. It follows Windows 11's look, including light and dark mode and your accent colour.

It doesn't reinvent compression. Underneath is the official 7z.dll from 7-Zip 26.04, unmodified: the engine 7-Zip itself runs on. Trove is the app around it, with the safety checks I think an archive tool should have.

Open it.
Browse it like a folder.

Trove opens ZIP (including AES-encrypted ones), 7Z, RAR and RAR5 (including encrypted and multi-part archives), TAR, GZ and TGZ, BZ2, XZ and TXZ, ZST, LZMA, ISO, UDF, CAB, WIM, ARJ, LZH, CPIO, RPM, DEB, DMG, XAR, VHD and VHDX, MSI, and many more of the formats the 7-Zip engine reads. Split archives (.001, .002, …) are joined automatically, and self-extracting .exe archives open like any other.

Inside, it works like File Explorer: folders, a breadcrumb, Back and Up (Alt+Left and Backspace), Windows' own file icons and type names, sizes, packed sizes and ratios, sorting and multi-select. The search box looks through the current folder and every folder inside it. The Info pane shows the format, method, sizes, ratio, whether the archive is encrypted or solid, how many parts it has, and its comment.

Double-click a file and Trove extracts it to a temporary folder and opens it with its usual app. If it's a program or a script, Trove asks first: “This is a program or script. Only run it if you trust where the archive came from.” You can drag files out to any folder in Explorer, or drag files in to add them. Add files and Delete work inside ZIP, 7Z and TAR archives, and Test checks every file's data.

Make a zip.
In one click.

Drop files on Trove's start page, use Create archive, or right-click files in Explorer and choose Compress to ZIP file. Trove makes ZIP, 7Z, TAR, TAR.GZ and TAR.XZ archives.

Trove can open and extract RAR archives, but it can't create them. RAR is a proprietary format, and the licence of the code that decodes it forbids using it to build a RAR-compatible archiver. For new archives, ZIP opens everywhere and 7Z is usually smaller.

The create dialog keeps the choices you're likely to need and nothing else: name and folder, format, one of four compression levels, splitting, a password, and Solid archive for 7Z, which is on by default (files are compressed together: smaller, but slower to change later). Delete the original files after archiving moves them to the Recycle Bin, and only once the archive was created completely. An existing archive with the same name is never replaced without asking.

The work runs in the background. The progress window shows each task's speed and time left, and its progress on the taskbar button. You can pause, resume or cancel, and the taskbar button flashes when everything is done.

Lock it.
Split it.

Tick Protect with a password (AES-256) and both ZIP and 7Z archives are encrypted with AES-256. Trove never uses ZipCrypto, the old and weak ZIP encryption. For 7Z there's Hide file names too: without the password, nobody can even see which files are inside. ZIP passwords can only use English letters, digits, spaces and common symbols, because that is what 7-Zip accepts for ZIP; Trove says so and suggests 7Z for anything else.

Split into parts offers 100 MB, 700 MB (CD), 4 GB (FAT32 USB drive) or a custom size. The parts are named .001, .002 and so on, and opening the first one opens the whole archive.

When an archive needs a password, Trove asks for it with a show/hide button and a friendly retry if it's wrong. Remember it until I close Trove keeps it in memory only; nothing is saved.

Nothing escapes
the folder you chose.

An archive is a list of names with data attached, and the names can lie. Take an entry called ../../AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Windows/Start Menu/Programs/Startup/updater.bat. Extract it into a folder in Downloads with a careless tool, and the two “..” climb back up to your user folder; the rest of the name leads into your Startup folder, where Windows runs the file the next time you sign in. That trick is called zip slip, and Trove blocks it.

Blocked entries never stop the rest of the archive: the ordinary files come out, and the result card turns amber with a summary. Nothing outside the destination folder is touched.

Right-click.
Done.

Setup can add a Trove submenu to File Explorer's right-click menu. Select several files and choose Compress to ZIP file, and they all go into one archive, named after the file or, for several, after their folder. Extract to a new folder doesn't nest twice: if everything in the archive is already inside one folder, that folder is what you get.

On Windows 11, these commands are under Show more options (or Shift+F10). The new compact menu only accepts packaged shell extensions, which Trove doesn't have yet. For the same reason the labels can't include the file's name.

Explorer starts one copy of the program for every selected file, so ten files would mean ten processes. The first Trove process to start becomes the leader; the others hand over their file through a named pipe and exit before any window code loads. Once nobody new has arrived for 350 milliseconds, the leader makes one archive with one progress window.

Setup can also add Trove to Open with for 30 archive types and list it under Settings › Apps › Default apps. To make it the default, right-click an archive, choose Open with › Choose another app › Trove and tick Always.

Built on 7-Zip.
Shaped like Windows 11.

Trove is written in C# with WPF. Archives are read and written by 7z.dll from 7-Zip 26.04, copied unmodified from the official releases for x64, x86 and ARM64. There's no wrapper library in between: I wrote the COM interop from 7-Zip's own headers (IInArchive, IOutArchive, the callbacks and PROPVARIANT), so Trove talks to the engine directly.

A few details took the most care. 7-Zip's objects can't cross COM apartments, so they never run on the UI thread. PROPVARIANT is 16 bytes in a 32-bit process and 24 in a 64-bit one, and getting that wrong only shows up in a 32-bit process. The ZIP writer keeps reading a file on its own threads after it reports that file finished, so Trove doesn't close a file the moment 7-Zip says it's done. Compressed tars are handled in two steps, through a temporary .tar.

Writes are careful by design. New archives are written under a temporary name and renamed at the end; adding or deleting files writes a new archive next to the old one and replaces it only on success. Extracted files go through temporary .part files, and the zone information of a downloaded archive (Windows' “Mark of the Web”) is copied to the files that come out of it.

The look is Windows 11's Fluent design: Mica on Windows 11 22H2 and later, light and dark themes that switch live with Windows, your accent colour, Segoe UI Variable and Microsoft's Fluent System Icons, drawn as vectors so they work on Windows 7 too. Settings › Appearance can also fix the theme to Light or Dark.

One codebase builds two targets: .NET 10 for Windows 10 and 11, published self-contained for x64, ARM64 and 32-bit, each with the 7-Zip engine for its processor; and .NET Framework 4.8 for Windows 7 SP1 and 8.1, one app that carries both the 32- and 64-bit engines, of which setup installs the one that matches Windows. 85 engine tests (round trips, passwords, split archives, zip slip, damaged archives, RAR and RAR5 samples, add and delete, conflicts, cancel and pause) run against both targets.

Trove uses the 7-Zip engine (7z.dll) by Igor Pavlov under the GNU LGPL, with the unRAR licence restriction for the RAR decoder, and Microsoft's Fluent UI System Icons under the MIT licence. Details are in the third-party notices. Trove is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by 7-Zip, Igor Pavlov or RARLAB.

The short version.
In 74 seconds.

If you'd rather watch than read, here is the launch video. English captions are on by default; turn them off from the video's controls.

A good start.
More to unpack.

Next on my list: a packaged shell extension, so Trove's commands appear in Windows 11's compact right-click menu and can show the file's name, like “Extract to Holiday photos”; code-signing, so SmartScreen stays quiet; Trove in more languages than English; and testing the ARM64 and Windows 7/8.1 builds on real hardware.

Archives are one of those everyday chores nobody thinks about until a tool gets in the way. Trove's job is to stay out of it: open what you're sent, make what you need, and never write a file where it shouldn't.

Every still image of Trove on this page is a real screenshot of version 1.0.0 (x64) on Windows 11, captured from Trove's own windows with demo files. The cover places two of them on a gradient background. The launch video is different: its app shots recreate Trove's interface from its source.