sedit - automatically encrypting text editor

With this program, you can:

Create a new sedit-encrypted file.
Open an existing sedit-encrypted file, modify it, and save it.

Note: For general file encryption use cases (where you would have previously used gpg), it is now recommended that you use age.

Dependencies

python 3+
pynacl 1.3.0 (you can install this with pip using pip3 install pynacl)
tkinter (you may have to install this. On fedora you can use sudo dnf install python3-tkinter)

How to use

There are 2 utilities provided: screate.py and sopen.py. These are used for creating and opening files respectively. In particular, screate.py simply creates a file. You need to then run sopen.py to open the file.

This text editor assumes that you use UTF-8 encoding.

Create a new file

$ python3 screate.py filename

This creates a new file named filename in the current directory (where screate.py is located).

If the file was successfully created, a message will be printed. You can then run:

$ python3 sopen.py filename

to open the file.

Open an existing file

$ python sopen.py filename.salsa20

If the file exists then this will open it. Otherwise it will fail with an error.

Installation on Unixy systems

The scripts can be used as-is out of the box, but for convenience you can add some scripts to your /usr/local/bin directory (Linux/OSX only) so that you don't have to type the full path of the script every time.

Save this to a file called screate in your /usr/local/bin directory:

#!/bin/bash
python3 /path/to/screate.py "$@" # make sure to change this path to where you're storing sedit

Save this to a file called sedit in your /usr/local/bin directory:

#!/bin/bash
python3 /path/to/sopen.py "$@"  # make sure to change this path to where you're storing sedit

Then run sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/screate /usr/local/bin/sedit. Now you can use the commands screate and sedit anywhere.

This means you can simply type sedit filename and it will just work, regardless of your current working directory.

Notes

Relationship to Dropass

This program is based on and supercedes Dropass. The code has been changed and the workflow has been simplified to make it more user-friendly. Search functionality has been added.

Some minor "quality of life" improvements have been made: Mac users can now use the Cmd key instead of Ctrl, and an annoying bug has been fixed where clicking past half of the whitespace at the end of a line would set the cursor to the start of the next line.

Code organization

I know it's not great, I'm still working on it. I wrote dropass 2 years ago and I haven't touched it until now. When I looked at it again, the most annoying thing that jumped out at me was that I couldn't easily tell which variables were global and which weren't, which is what has led to the current class-based design, with all the state encapsulated within the class. It's quite likely that I will revisit this code again some years later and "refactor" it once again.

Keyboard shortcuts:

Ctrl-s to save file (file will be automatically encrypted with your master password when saved - plaintext will be deleted - gone - once you close the editor). Cool thing to notice is that every time you save, a new IV will be randomly generated so the ciphertext will be completely different to before (even if the plaintext is exactly the same)! Pretty cool imo.
Ctrl-w to close editor
Ctrl-a to select all
Ctrl-l to select current line
Ctrl-f to enter search mode and search text
Esc to exit search mode

Substitute Ctrl for Cmd if you're using a Mac keyboard.

Please report any bugs you find in Issues (ideally with steps to reproduce, and expected behavior). I check my emails every day and I am the active maintainer for this project.

1f604 / sedit