Chapter 1. Overview

A very simple FileHandler which allows to view the contents of files which had been packed with a stream compressor such as gzip, bzip2 or xz. The contained file can be opened with any supported FileHandler.

The selection algorithm which decides what FileHandler to use for each file type is the same as that of the FileBrowserWindow which started the pack viewer. Hence it is possible to manually decide which handler to use by pressing SHIFT while right clicking the contained file in the overview panel and all FileHandlers available in the application will be available in the same manner in the pack viewer too.

The thus selected file will be extracted to a temporary directory. The chosen FileHandler will then be started on that temporary file, initially in non-editable mode. This is due to the fact that any modifications to such temporary files will not be incorporated back into the packed file (as this is a pure viewer FileHandler). However, by manually toggling the corresponding setting in the application, the thus opened handler on the file will allow saving its changes, but this will in most cases be of no use as the temporary file will get deleted as soon as the pack viewer is closed. Each pack viewer instance will maintain its own unique directory for temporary file extraction so multiple instances won't get in each others way.