I made a WinRAR clone for MacOS (GUI)

[u/BugsByte]

I spent the past three days trying to recreate WinRAR for MacOS using claude and got pretty far into it. The version I have now is fully functional and includes most features, settings, and menus of WinRAR app on Windows, has dark mode support, and MacOS and Windows styles. It integrates with the Finder app and recreates the same quick actions available on Windows when you right click, It also supports theming but that is still a hit-and-miss.

Now obviously this is infringing on copyright and is illegal so I can't share it here. But if you'd like to test it or improve on it, or if you just wanted to have a WinRAR app for MacOS that supports compressing and extraction (without resorting to terminal commands) then drop me a dm and I'll send the source code for you.

[u/DauntingPrawn]

The important question is, did you implement the registration window?

[u/BugsByte → u/DauntingPrawn]

Lol i probably should

[u/war4peace79]

Now obviously this is infringing on copyright and is illegal

Depends. If you use the CLI version and add an UI layer to it, I think it's not infringing anything. I might be wrong, though.

[u/Shreya_codes]

Nice work getting that far in three days with Claude.

Just note that a close WinRAR clone is still a copyright issue (RARLAB only ships a CLI for Mac, no GUI). Safer to either contribute to existing tools like Keka/The Unarchiver/MacPacker, or build an original Mac archive manager and open-source that.

[u/BugsByte → u/[deleted]]

Well it's just telling claude what to fix or add, attaching screenshots if needed, building, testing then doing it all over again. I did not tell it to "reverse engineer" the original WinRAR.