NanaZip VS 7-Zip-zstd

If you have Windows 10 or above, you should instead use NanaZip instead of 7-Zip-zstd. It is a massively improved fork of 7-Zip.

The first part of modernizing is port everything to XAML, adding dark mode and others. It's expected to be during this year, new UI in 2024. It's in their roadmap in GitHub

https://github.com/M2Team/NanaZip

imo better integration with Win 10/11 context menus and more compression codecs

These days NanaZip is considered to be better, it's a fork of 7Zip.

Programs like NanaZip (a 7zip fork) that do implement the new API are right there on the right-click menu where you'd want them to be.

Do you consider rar a standard? It's a pretty good format, even though there aren't any good open-source implementations. But if you're willing to pay for your software, WinRAR command line versions are available for most platforms.

7zip is the most obvious free alternative. There is also a 7zip fork that offers zstd [1]. The command line experience for 7zip isn't very good however.

1: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

Check out https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

There's also this fork which supports additional compressions: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

7-zip is actually not a bad option, but I'd strongly advise using the fast-lzma2 codec, because, well, it is waay faster, and might even give you better ratios, depending on how you use it. You can find an implementation here, and it is compatible with traditional 7-zip (you can decompress it on any computer with any newish version of 7z)

Hi, PeaZip can use McMilk's additional compression codecs for 7z format (Zstandard, Brotli, Lizard, etc), https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

You can extract the files yourself with 7Zip. You can install 7Zip from here and then install this plugin to extract ZStandard files, or you can directly install the modified 7Zip with the plugin already from that plugin page. Then simply open the zst file you downloaded with 7Zip and extract it.