Pick your platform. Every build is signed, free, and contains the same features. No email required, no "download manager", no bundled toolbars — ever.
Installer builds register file associations automatically. Portable builds run from any folder with no installation.
Recommended: the installer registers .zip .rar .7z .tar .tgz .tar.gz .iso file associations and adds right-click "Compress / Extract with OpenBox" to Explorer.
The .pkg installer registers file associations via Launch Services. Ad-hoc signed — on first launch right-click the app and choose "Open" to whitelist.
Portable tarball. Fyne uses OpenGL for rendering, so you need a working GL stack. On a minimal server install you may need libgl1-mesa-dev and friends — but on a desktop distro it just works.
Quick platform-specific notes. For full instructions see the README on GitHub.
Double-click the .exe installer. The wizard is bilingual — pick English or 简体中文 on the first screen. On the "Additional tasks" page, leave "Associate .zip .rar .7z .tar .tgz .tar.gz .iso" checked. Click Install. After install, right-clicking any file shows "Compress with OpenBox"; right-clicking any archive shows "Extract with OpenBox".
Double-click the .pkg to open it in Installer.app. Click through welcome → readme → license → install. Enter your password when prompted. The installer copies OpenBox to /Applications and registers file types via lsregister. On first launch, Gatekeeper may prompt — right-click the app → "Open" → "Open" to whitelist it.
For the portable .tar.gz, strip the quarantine attribute before first run:
# Apple Silicon portable
tar xzf openbox-macos-arm64.tar.gz
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine openbox
./openboxUntar and run. No installation step. If the binary fails to launch with a GL error, install the runtime libraries:
# Linux portable
tar xzf openbox-linux-amd64.tar.gz
./openbox
# If GL is missing on Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt install libgl1-mesa-glx libegl1 libx11-67z extraction is pure Go and works out of the box. 7z compression shells out to the official 7-Zip CLI because the open-source Go ecosystem has no stable 7z writer. Install it once and OpenBox picks it up automatically on next launch:
# Windows
# Download from https://www.7-zip.org/download.html
# macOS
brew install 7zip
# Linux
sudo apt install p7zip-full # Debian / Ubuntu
sudo dnf install p7zip # Fedora
sudo pacman -S p7zip # ArchPrefer to build it yourself? The whole project is open source. Clone, build, ship.
# Prereqs: Go 1.23+ (Linux also needs CGO + GL/X11 headers)
git clone https://github.com/samaidev/openbox.git
cd openbox
go build -o openbox ./cmd/openbox
./openboxSee the Build section of the README for platform-specific build requirements.
The OpenBox CLI is also packaged as a Python module so any LLM agent with shell access can compress and extract archives programmatically.
→ AI Agent quick start