Zip as a folder (.zip)

A .zip opens in its own tab: the member tree on the left (name, size, date) and the selected member's content on the right — text/code, Markdown (rendered), image or PDF — opened in memory, without extracting anything to disk. Text and Markdown can be edited: Ctrl+S rewrites the member inside the .zip itself.

The same tab opens .7z, .rar, .tar (including .tar.gz, .tar.bz2 and .tar.xz), .cab and .iso — those are read-only: you can browse, view and extract members, but not edit. Only .zip is writable, because it is the one format we can safely rewrite (.rar is proprietary and not even free libraries compress it).

Images and PDFs are read-only; very large members (and .parquet) only offer Extract to…. Creating, renaming or deleting members is not supported.

Sort, select and extract. Clicking the Name, Size or Modified header sorts the tree (names in natural order, folders on top), clicking again reverses, and the choice and the widths are remembered; the date follows the language. Ctrl+click and Shift+click select several members and folders. Extract to... writes the selection into a folder, each folder with everything inside it (with a single file selected, it asks for the file name), and Extract all... writes the whole content; both are on the toolbar and in the context menu, which also opens on a folder and on the empty area. Whatever already exists at the destination is asked once for the whole batch: replace or skip the existing ones. This applies to every format of this tab.

The extraction report. At the end, a message says how many files were written and what was left out, with how many and the first example: an entry whose path would leave the destination folder (such as ../x), an entry refused by the reader (size, password or corrupted file), a file that could not be written, an existing file that was kept, and a name changed to be valid on this system. Enter opens or closes a folder and shows a member, and Ctrl+C copies the internal path of the selection, one per line.

Password protected members are read normally: when you open one, LightNote asks for the password (up to three tries) and, by ticking "Remember this file's password", does not ask again — within the same run by default, and across runs too if the box is ticked (protected by Windows, for you on this machine only; erase them all in Settings → Features). Note one difference of the format compared to PDF: in a .zip the encryption is per member and the index stays in cleartext, so the file listing shows in full even without the password — only the content is protected. A .zip with encrypted members is not reopened on startup.