After Florin mentioned he could browse and edit jar files from within Total Commander, I figured there had to be a Windows Shell extension that did a similar thing. Turns out it’s built into XP! I showed one of my mates, and he said, “Sure, I do that all the time”… so I guess it’s old news to some, but not to me!
All you need to do is associate jar/ear/war files with the Compressed (zipped) Folder extension from within Explorer and it’s all go. Just fire up Explorer, head into /Folder/Options.. and from the File Types tab, create a new association for JAR files to point to “Compressed (Zipped) Folders”. There is a groovy little how-to available covering all this.
The true coolness, though, is that when you are browsing inside the jar, the folders are writable via standard Explorer cut and paste / drag and drop, which is great for hacking jar files in place and patching a given class (not that you would ever do such a thing… but there you go).
Alright, enough of the win32-ery for a while… We return you to your standard cross-platform bloggery…