Ark, the KDE archive manager, has been around for a while (almost 17 years) but for the last few years its development has been slowed due to lack of manpower. In the past few weeks I have been started getting familiar with the Ark codebase and now the first results are going to be availables. Starting from KDE Applications 14.12 (scheduled for December), Ark will receive a couple of new features which have been requested for years:

  • the ability to show a context menu when right-clicking on an archived entry
  • the ability to open an archived file with a chosen application

ark-contextual-menu

The above screenshot shows the contextual menu and the available actions. As you can see, now there is a new Open With... action, which will extract the selected file to a temporary location and will open it with your preferred application. For example in the following screenshot I’ve opened the file using Kate:

ark-tmpfile

This means that now you can quickly work on a single file with just a single click, while before you had to extract that single file and save it on a particular location, before you could edit it. I’d like to thank Volker Härtel, the original author of this patch, and Raphael Kubo da Costa, the Ark maintainer, who has reviewed it.

This is just the beginning. I’m working on other features, for example the ability to create password-protected archives and the ability to move and rename entries within an archive. Stay tuned!