Reader Mike O’Callahan would like to see one of StuffIt Deluxe’s conveniences brought to the Finder. He writes:
One of the things I like most about StuffIt Deluxe is that it lets you stuff a file or folder by selecting the item and pressing Command-S. I wish the Finder’s Create Archive command had a similar keyboard shortcut for creating .zip archives. Is there a way to create a shortcut that does that?
There is, and it’s easy to do. Just launch System Preferences and select the Keyboard & Mouse preference. Click the Keyboard Shortcut tab and click the Plus button at the bottom of the window. In the sheet that appears, select Finder from the Application pop-up menu and in the Menu Title field enter Create Archive. In the Keyboard Shortcut field enter the keyboard command you want to use—Option-S, for example. Click Add and quit System Preferences.
Log out and log back in and you’ll discover that the Create Archive command now bears the keyboard shortcut you assigned.
Note that if you already have StuffIt Deluxe you can use it to create .zip archives and, of course, StuffIt Deluxe offers advantages over the Finder’s Archive command—encryption (though you can encrypt archives with Disk Utility), the ability to expand and compress files in a variety of compression formats, tighter compression, secure deleting, archive via rename, and on and on.