Many, many years ago after I started using mods for SC4, I soon became hugely frustrated with the sheer number of god-awful ClickTeam installers. What is a ClickTeam installer?, well it's simply an application a modder can use to package their content into an Installer program. You can recognise them by this icon:
Yes, other installer systems exist, for example NSIS which I use personally, but all of those can be opened by 7Zip or similar, so if you have say 20 downloads, all containing a single DAT file, you can just pull them out like you would if they were .zip files. But, ClickTeam installers are properly hateful, until now, there has just been no way to get at the files inside. Coupled with the fact that they are the most abundant type of installer in our community, they have literally been a scourge and like zombies, should be shot in the head on sight, don't forget the Double-Tap!
Not to take anything away from the efforts to repackage these files on the exchanges, which will still hopefully become a thing. Today I found a command-line tool that just sodding extracts the files inside the installer on GitHub:
https://github.com/Bioruebe/cicdec
No GUI as yet, plus I'm too lazy to test this on more than one such installer for the time being, so no guarantees either. However first impressions are I no longer have to click 7 times, when I can just run a command and be done.
Huge thanks to cicdec for this wonderful little tool.