Reading Time: 2minutes
If you're looking for just Mac OS X, console version of rar and unrar then standard WinRar website binaries for Mac should be perfect for you.
If you're an advanced Mac OS X user with UNIX background and you've already installed Mac Ports or Brew – The Missing package manager for Mac OS X
To install WinRar on Mac (with brew) with:
macosx# brew install unrar
If you're using MacPorts instead:
macosx:/home$ sudo port install unrar
However console version isn't the best choice for my wife which is not a console ninja, so I had to look and install some oher Graphic Interface program 🙂
As I don't like using AppleStore (I can't even properly register for an Apple Store ID,as I'm required to fill in my credit card …)
Hence I looked online on some WinRar dearchiver GUIs and found IZip which is natively a ZIP archiver but also supports .RAR Archives.
Though IZIp website give the impression IZip is a great tiny prog, once installing the .DMG downloaded from the website and installing into Applications it turned out IZip is currently crashing on the Mac Book Air with Mac OS X 10.8.5 – Mountain Lion …
If you want a simplistic interface program you would probably want to check out UnrarX though I personally didin't liked that one because it is not properly handing UTF-8 and CP-1251 filenames written in Russian, Bulgarian Cyrillic and probably also Chineese, Viatnamese and other exotic language encodings.
After few more minutes of searching I finally got KEKA – The Free Mac OSX file archiver.
Though the program Logo is a little scary, Keka turned to be very nice tiny, easy to install WinRAR GUI interfaced program for Mac OS X and the installation comes to standard download and run of .DMG file and moving it to the Finder Applications.
Once installed, if you turn to have a .rar file association issues (by default in my case) files were opened with VLC. To change the file type association of a certain file on the Mac I've had to press Command (button) + I over the .rar extensioned file, e.g:
- Command + I
- Click to expand the “Open with” section within that files info screen
- From the pull down menu, select the application you want to open this specific file with
- Close the Get Info window
More helpful Articles

Tags: association, best choice, DMG, file, How to, program, rar, sudo, turn, version
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:44.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/44.0
For those who can afford it or prefer even better (from functionality point of view) WinRar / WinZipper for MacOSX check in Apple iStore for Suffit Expanded
Also another good free software for winrar for Mac OS X I forgot to mention in article is 7Zip
View CommentView Comment