Displays archives created with NSKeyedArchiver in a readable JSON format.
The storage format used by NSKeyedArchiver is optimized for size and speed, not readability. It places all objects in a single unsorted array and represents relationships through references into that array. This deduplicates identical objects and allows constant-time lookups. Although tools like defaults or plutil can dump such archives on macOS, their output is hard to interpret. This viewer presents the archive in a more readable form and exposes its object graph, which is essential for unarchiving when the original class implementations are unavailable.
To build the viewer, just execute
swiftc -o NSKeyedArchiveViewer src/NSKeyedArchiveViewer.swift
and run it with
./NSKeyedArchiveViewer <archive-path>
For comparison, here is the output of plutil, defaults, and NSKeyedArchiveViewer. Which one is more readable?
plutil -p <archive>defaults read <archive>(<archive>must be absolute path for this to work!)NSKeyedArchiveViewer <archive>