Once there was a Gnome-applet in Ubuntu (Seahorse?) which helped me with encryption/decryption of PGP text messages. It was able to encrypt or decrypt the clipboard.
Since Unity I have no idea, how to integrate this applet into my desktop. What is the recommended way to encrypt/decrypt text messages like emails or just some text from the web?
For email, there is a thunderbird addon called Enigmail which performs email encryption or signing, and is quite nicely integrated. Install it from the Software Center or with
sudo apt-get install enigmail
.Seahorse still exists (it is called "Passwords and Keys" if you search in the dash), but does appear to have lost built-in support for text encryption/signing (I think - I don't have a GPG key on this system to test with).
This thread gives the syntax for signing, encrypting, verifying and decrypting text in the console with the
gpg
command.This answer explains how to add gpg integration to
gedit
, although I must admit I was expecting to find better plugin support for encrypt/sign in bothgedit
andtomboy
notes without obvious success.Pyrite was written just for this purpose. It's not packaged yet -- so not in the repos; you'll have to follow a few instructions to download and extract it to a location of your choice manually, but it works wonderfully IMHO. (I would say that though.. since I'm the developer.)
As bessman mentioned,
seahorse-nautilus
is the way to go if you want to asymmetrically-encrypt files in the file browser. (In addition to text,pyrite
can do symmetric & asymmetric encryption of files, but it's not integrated with Nautilus.)Finally, check out the answer on this older question for more details on setting up
gedit
withgpg
.You can integrate Seahorse with Nautilus by installing
seahorse-nautilus
. It will allow you to encrypt and decrypt files and folders by right-clicking them.