dennis2society / kate-gpg-plugin

This is a GPG plugin for the Kate text editor

Kate GPG Plugin

This plugin allows to GPG decrypt and encrypt text files using the GPGMe library in KDE's text editor KATE.

Features

• Plugin shows all available GPG keys with basic name filtering (auto-selects the most recently created key)
• Manual selection of key used for encryption
• Symmetric encryption possible

Prerequisites

• A CMake & C++ build environment is installed
• Qt development libraries are installed
• C/C++ bindings for GPGMEpp are installed
• At least one public+private GPG key pair (if you only want to encrypt to yourself)

Caution!

While this plugin makes it easy to decrypt+encrypt text, it also makes it easy to mess things up. You could accidentally encrypt a file, e.g. with a key that is not yours, which then you wouldn't be able to decrypt. Or you could accidentally save a currently decrypted file as plain text, leaving it unecrypted.

• Use with care!
• Think twice before pressing Ctrl+S!
• Ctrl+Z works after encryption and saving.

Build Instructions

Dependencies

This plugin was developed and built on Manjaro Linux running KDE Plasma. I have tested the build in a fresh non-KDE Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS VM and had to install at least these packages manually:

• git
• cmake
• extra-cmake-modules
• cmake-extras
• g++
• kate
• libgpgmepp-dev (this should also install qmake and quite a few Qt dev libs)
• libgcrypt20-dev
• libgpg-error-dev
• libecm1-dev

This line should do it for recent Ubuntu based distributions:
sudo apt install git cmake extra-cmake-modules cmake-extras g++ kate libgpgmepp-dev libgcrypt20-dev libgpg-error-dev libecm1-dev

Build

• Clone the git repository
• Run CMake in the cloned folder:
• This works for me with both Qt >= 5.15.* and Qt6.
  cmake -B build/ -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -D QT_MAJOR_VERSION=5 (or 6)
• cmake --build build/
• Install the plugin to the Kate plugin path. This requires sudo!
  
  • Recommended:
    sudo cmake --install build/
    (I had cases when this was unreliable... If this does not work see manual installation below)
    
  • Manual installation in Manjaro:
    sudo cp build/kate_gpg_plugin.so /usr/lib/qt/plugins/ktexteditor/
    or if you prefer a symlink:
    sudo ln -s build/kate_gpg_plugin.so /usr/lib/qt/plugins/ktexteditor/
    
  • Manual installation in Ubuntu:
    sudo cp build/kate_gpg_plugin.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/plugins/ktexteditor/
    (In my Ubuntu VM symlinking the plugin did not work. Plugin doesn't show up in Kate unless copied...)
    
• Run kate (from the current terminal prompt)
• Enable the "GPG Plugin" in Kate → Settings → Configure Kate → Plugins.
  A new vertical button should appear in the left sidebar.
  

Limitations

• Currently only the default email address for a key fingerprint will be used for encryption
• No support for subkeys yet
• Password prompts are handled by GPG(Me) and may look ugly. Won't touch this!

TODO

• Automatically retrieve key fingerprint/ID and mail address from encrypted file to set as selected "To:" key and mail address
• Attach to KATE's "Open File" dialog to suggest automatic decryption when a .gpg/.pgp/.asc file is opened

• Attach to KATE's Save/Save As dialog to strongly suggest to re-encrypt a currently opened GPG file (to avoid saving it as unencrypted).
• Sign and verify documents
• Add support for subkeys

© 2023, Dennis Lübke, kate-gpg-plugin (at) dennis2society.de