Your archive tool has known the percentage the whole time. It just wasn't telling you.
7Sense sits quietly in your system tray and watches for archive extractions. When one starts, it pre-scans the archive for its total uncompressed size, then watches the destination folder grow in real time — and turns that into an actual percentage.
Works alongside whatever you already use. No patches to Ark, File Roller, or anything else. No elevated permissions required to run. Uninstalling is deleting one .desktop file.
When an extraction starts, a progress window shows the real percentage, time remaining, and the file being extracted. The look adapts to your desktop environment — KDE, GNOME, Xfce, whatever you're running, it fits in.
That's it up there. The whole app.
The daemon is written in Rust and idles at ~4 MB RAM with a 1.3 MB binary on disk. No Electron. No embedded browser. No 200 MB Python runtime parked in your tray for the rest of your login session just to watch a folder grow. Three threads total — one drives the D-Bus tray, one runs the monitor loop, one parks main. That's the whole thing.
A short wizard walks you through everything on first launch. Four screens, takes 10 seconds.
Welcome — the whole point, in one screen |
 Dependency check — installs anything missing for you |
 Pick which archive types to watch |
 A few sensible defaults you can tune |
 Done — 4 MB in your tray, out of your way |
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Add the repository once and get automatic updates forever:
curl -fsSL https://jackharvest.github.io/7sense/gpg.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/7sense.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/7sense.gpg arch=amd64] https://jackharvest.github.io/7sense stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/7sense.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install 7senseDone. Future releases install automatically with sudo apt upgrade like any other app.
Grab the right package from the latest release.
Debian / Ubuntu / Mint — download the .deb, then:
sudo apt install ./7Sense-ubuntu-debian-mint.debFedora / RHEL / openSUSE — download the .rpm, then:
sudo rpm -i 7Sense-fedora-rhel-opensuse.rpmArch / Manjaro — download the .pkg.tar.zst, then:
sudo pacman -U 7Sense-arch-manjaro.pkg.tar.zstEverything else — download the .tar.gz, extract it, and run ./7sense from inside the folder. The wizard will walk you through the rest.
If you'd rather build it yourself:
git clone https://github.com/jackharvest/7sense.git
cd 7senseInstall the one Python dependency your distro needs:
# Debian / Ubuntu / Mint
sudo apt install python3-pyqt6 libnotify-bin
# Arch / Manjaro
sudo pacman -S python-pyqt6 libnotify
# Fedora
sudo dnf install python3-pyqt6 libnotifyThen build the Rust daemon (requires Rust):
cd 7sense-daemon && cargo build --release && cd ..Then launch:
./7senseThe setup wizard takes it from there.
| Archive type | Tool(s) detected |
|---|---|
.7z |
7z, 7zz |
.tar.gz / .tgz |
tar, bsdtar |
.tar.xz / .txz |
tar, bsdtar |
.zip |
unzip |
.rar |
unar, unrar |
You can turn individual formats on or off from the Settings menu.
- Watches
/procfor archive tool processes by name - Pre-scans the archive to get the total uncompressed size (header reads only — no decompression)
- Measures the destination folder growing as files are extracted
- Reports the ratio as a real percentage, updated every ~1.5 seconds
For .gz files, the uncompressed size is stored in the last 4 bytes of the stream — 7Sense just reads those. For .xz it calls xz --list. For .zip it calls unzip -l. For .7z and .rar it runs 7z l -slt.
The monitoring runs as a small Rust binary (~4 MB RAM at idle). The Python setup wizard runs once on first launch, hands off to the daemon, and exits.
Right-click the tray icon → Settings to adjust:
- Which archive formats to watch
- Whether the tray icon stays visible when nothing is extracting
- Minimum extraction time before a notification appears (default: 3 seconds — skips the ones that finish before you blink)
Settings write to ~/.config/7sense/config.json. The daemon re-reads it on every poll cycle, so changes take effect immediately without a restart.
- Linux with a freedesktop-compliant DE (KDE Plasma, GNOME + AppIndicator extension, Xfce, etc.)
- Python 3.9+ and PyQt6 — for the one-time setup wizard only
notify-send— for desktop notifications (libnotify-binon Debian-based,libnotifyon Arch)- Optional:
7z,unar/unrar,xz— only needed for the archive types you actually use
The setup wizard detects missing dependencies and offers to install them automatically on apt, pacman, dnf, and zypper systems.
MIT
If 7Sense saved you some sanity, a coffee is always appreciated.
AI tools were used for cross-platform compatibility research during development.