~ $ cat projects/grizzly.md
Grizzly
A native macOS & iOS app that lets you browse a ZIP like it's already unpacked — open a multi-gigabyte archive instantly, Quick Look any file, and extract only what you need.
What it is
Grizzly is a native macOS and iOS app for opening ZIP archives and treating them like a folder you can walk through. Browse the tree, search it, Quick Look any file with the spacebar, and extract only the parts you want — without unpacking the whole thing first. Built in SwiftUI on top of ZIPFoundation.
Why
Every OS already “opens” zips — by silently extracting the entire archive to a temp folder so you can look at one file inside it. That’s invisible for a 2 MB download and miserable for a 4 GB one. I wanted the Finder experience for archives: see the structure immediately, peek at a file, grab the three I actually need, and never pay to unpack the rest. The story behind it is here.
How it works
- Opens an archive by reading only its central directory — the index every zip keeps at the end — so a multi-gigabyte file opens about as fast as a small one.
- Folds the flat list of entry paths into a real folder tree, processed in chunks of 1,000 so the UI never blocks on a huge archive.
- Streams extraction straight to disk, and pulls an individual file into memory only when you preview or open it.
Features
- Finder-like tree browser with breadcrumbs, recursive search, and multi-select.
- Quick Look preview on spacebar — images, PDFs, text, code, and more.
- Extract a single file, a folder, or the whole archive to a destination you pick.
- Drag-and-drop to open; double-click a
.zipstraight from Finder. - Full keyboard navigation; ships for macOS and iOS/iPadOS.
- Open source (MIT), with CI that cuts a signed DMG on every tagged release.