WinRAR Keygen GUI

Principle of WinRAR key generation

English | 简体中文

1. Introduction

WinRAR Keygen GUI is a graphical companion for the winrar-keygen CLI tool. It provides a modern Windows desktop interface built with .NET 10 WPF and Fluent Design (WPF UI), allowing you to generate WinRAR license files without using the command line.

For the key generation algorithm, see How does it work?

2. Download

Go to the Releases page and download the variant that matches your system.

Build Variants

Variant	Architecture	.NET Runtime Required	Size
x64	AMD64 (most Windows PCs)	No (self-contained)	~69 MB
x64-dotnet	AMD64	Yes (.NET 10 Desktop Runtime)	~6 MB
ARM64	ARM64 (Surface Pro X, Snapdragon laptops)	No (self-contained)	~65 MB
ARM64-dotnet	ARM64	Yes (.NET 10 Desktop Runtime)	~6 MB

Which one should I download?

• Most users: download x64 -- it works out of the box on any 64-bit Windows PC.
• If you already have .NET 10 Desktop Runtime installed, download x64-dotnet for a smaller file.
• For ARM-based Windows devices, download ARM64 or ARM64-dotnet.

The architecture label is displayed in the bottom-right corner of the GUI (e.g. x64, ARM64 (.NET)).

3. Features

Encoding

Supports three encoding types for the license file:

Encoding	Description
UTF-8 (default)	Supports all Unicode characters. Automatically adds utf8: prefix when non-ASCII characters are present.
ASCII	Only full ASCII characters (0x20--0x7E). Non-ASCII input will trigger a warning.
ANSI	Windows locale-dependent encoding (e.g. Windows-1252). May produce garbled text on other systems.

Activate WinRAR

When enabled, the generated key is written directly to %APPDATA%\WinRAR\rarreg.key, activating WinRAR without manual file copying. When disabled, the key is saved to a custom output path.

Settings

Setting	Description
Remember Settings	Persist preferences between sessions. When disabled, startup uses Windows theme and Windows UI language, and other preferences reset to defaults.
Theme	Choose System, Light, or Dark from the settings page.
Language	Choose System, English, or 简体中文 from the settings page.
Autofill License Name	Pre-fills "Single PC usage license" as the default license name.
Back Up Existing Key	Creates a timestamped backup of rarreg.key before overwriting.
Check for Updates	Automatically checks GitHub for new releases on startup. A red dot appears on the version number when an update is available.

Other

• System -- follows the current Windows theme and Windows UI language. Simplified Chinese Windows UI uses Simplified Chinese; other languages use English.
• Version check -- click the version number to manually check for updates or open the releases page.

4. Build from Source

Prerequisites

• .NET 10 SDK or later
• Windows 10 / 11

Build

dotnet restore
dotnet build
dotnet run

Publish All Variants

Use the included build script to generate all 4 variants at once:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File build.ps1

Output is placed in the publish/ directory:

publish/
  x64/winrar-keygen-gui.exe          (~69 MB, self-contained)
  x64-dotnet/winrar-keygen-gui.exe   (~6 MB, requires .NET 10)
  ARM64/winrar-keygen-gui.exe        (~65 MB, self-contained)
  ARM64-dotnet/winrar-keygen-gui.exe (~6 MB, requires .NET 10)

5. License

The code is available under the MIT license