PeaZip, the cross-platform update introduces reading capabilities for large .zim archives alongside automated target directory routing and hidden-menu hotkeys.
On 12 July, 2026, the PeaZip 11.2 update released with added read support for Zeno IMproved (.zim) archives, which are commonly used for distributing large, offline copies of data dumps like Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg. The software now supports a total of 243 file extensions as archives. The underlying engine components have been updated to 7z/p7zip version 26.02 and the proprietary PEA component version 1.32. The bundled PEA component has hardened its integrity tag verification against timing attacks.
Dropping files or folders into PeaZip now displays a dedicated actions menu, featuring Copy, Move, Extract, Add to Archive, and Open as Archive. Selecting ‘Add to archive’ or ‘Extract’ from the drag-and-drop menu automatically routes the files to the correct operation screen and presets the target directory. Cross-platform desktop environment consistency is improved by enabling users to hold Shift or Ctrl while dragging from the OS to reliably trigger this special actions menu. Drag-and-drop between separate, open PeaZip instances is now fully supported on Windows, including direct drag-and-drop extraction.
Keyboard shortcuts now function completely even when the application’s main menu bar is hidden. A new shortcut (F12) opens the ‘Functions’ picker interface, letting users search for or choose any supported app function from a dropdown menu to run on selected files. The classic ‘Run’ command has been remapped to Ctrl + F12.
When extracting multi-volume RAR archives into a new folder, PeaZip now cleanly strips out the .part1 suffix from the automatically generated output folder name. Finally, a contextual hint has been added to the ‘Output’ button to clarify that pure compression formats, like Brotli, BZip2, GZip, XZ, and Zstandard, inherently preserve original filenames and extensions.
