Vim password manager
Vim can also be used to safely store information, by encrypting text files with different cryp
methods. To see the cryp
method that Vim is currently using, type:
:set cryptmethod?
We can see in our case it is zip
, which is not actually a crypto
method and does not offer much in terms of security. To see what different alternatives we have, we can type:
:h 'cryptmethod'
A page describing the different encryption methods comes up. We can choose from zip
, blowfish,
and blowfish2
.The most secure and recommended one is, of course, blowfish2
. To change the encryption method, type:
:set cryptmethod=blowfish2
This can be also added to vimrc
so that it becomes the default encryption. Now we can safely encrypt files using Vim.
A common scenario would be storing a passwords file.
Let's open up a new file named passwords.txt
, add some dummy passwords inside, and save it. The next step is to encrypt the file with a password, and for this we type :X
.
Vim will prompt you for...