# Quickly Encrypting Blocks of Text in Vim

Keeping your notes in a public GitHub repo is a good way to share useful information. But, there are probably a few things that you’d like to keep encrypted for various reasons. Here’s how to leverage GPG and vim’s `!` command (which lets you call external programs) to encrypt blocks of text without encrypting entire files.

### TL;DR

This assumes you have `gpg` installed and on your path.

**To encrypt:** select the plaintext with `V`, press `:`, and then enter the command `!gpg -ca`. You will be prompted to set a password.

**To decrypt:** select the PGP message with `V`, press `:`, and then enter the command `!gpg -qd`. Enter in the password you set when encrypting.

### Encrypting

Select the text you’d like to encrypt in visual mode. (for example, select the lines using `V`).

Then, type `:` to being entering a command, and `!gpg -ca`. The `c` flag instructs gpg to use symmetric, passphrase based encryption, and running this command will prompt you for a password. The `a` flag adds ‘ascii armor’ to the encrypted text, so that the original plaintext will be replaced with this:

|     |     |
| --- | --- |
| ```<br>1<br>2<br>3<br>4<br>5<br>6<br>7<br>8<br>9<br>10<br>11<br>``` | ```<br>-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----<br>Version: GnuPG v1<br>jA0EBwMCEXxPltvl7GJg0sBFAUFetQsNCNH9pgpKfP0b+YVcv4TKuH36riJJC2kB<br>kyKbT/pDoTWxfLsPAfFZOyGl37VeLuyPrzdu/OUiHaSMOCXtizI0mv6yd1ovVY4P<br>e/gQU7jDhlLJrVdU2fYV6qwAJLGi8lRuRbNzTdqNPw37jxA/YQN5IOYAenRFB2Sr<br>w2kgpkDwPcwT8IOc9J9ViH5Vinxmks2JhgrNdhw4DIB29+77N5ui09Vegkbud4Te<br>pAY4zNgVLRCR8Zg2+BX2ns4OyeIjt/eROquUqz0BItAK50mTSi1uQlkBfNZ8PSlH<br>wvKwAwhLIu4Y0OyYOCz26cxJR4EhSoZEy3ByY8kE6itI8BcgQqIW<br>=dbgJ<br>-----END PGP MESSAGE-----<br>``` |

### Decrypting

To decrypt, select the ‘armored’ block of text in visual mode, type `:` and enter the command `!gpg -qd`, as above. The `d` flag will decrypt the visually selected text, and will prompt you for a password. The `q` flag prevents various other info from being printed. Enter the password you entered when encrypting, and the ‘armored’ PGP message will be replaced by your original plaintext!

### Using Key

If you don’t want to keep typing passwords to encrypt/decrypt files, you can use your PGP key.

This assumes that you’ve already generated a keypair.

In order to avoid repeatedly specifying yourself as the recipient of the ‘message’, set yourself as the ‘default recipient’ by adding the following to `~/.gnupg/gpg.conf`:

|     |     |
| --- | --- |
| ```<br>1<br>2<br>``` | ```<br>default-recipient <yourkeyid><br>default-recipient-self<br>``` |

`<yourkeyid>` can be found with `gpg --list-keys`, it’s the eight-character value after the `/` in the second column.

Then, everything works the same, except that you encrypt the text using `!gpg -ae` instead of `!gpg -ca`. Decryption will work automatically with `!gpg -qd`.

Keep in mind that you now need to make sure that you don’t lose your private key!