GnuPG front ends

[Jeffrey F. Bloss]

Patton Echols wrote:

> It looks like there are a couple of GUI front ends available for
> GnuPG. Looking at the web sites, It appears that Seahorse is more
> full featured than GPA, though my needs are fairly small.  I'd expect
> some level of key manager and I  want to be able to encrypt / sign
> clipboard contents or point to file, my choice.  Any thoughts about
> which might be a better choice?

I've probably tried every front end there is on both Windows and Linux
boxen. I'm currently using GPA for what little GUI gpg stuff I do. It
lacks any clipboard functionality, but I have vim scripts for that.
It's a good, solid kayring manager with Keyserver and file
encrypt/decrypt support. It also has outstanding support for viewing
information about keys, sub keys, signatures, and such.

The thing I disliked about Seahorse is its implementation of
ssh/gpg-agent. On two systems now I've had to manually seek and destroy
all agent settings because they conflict with the GnuPG "standard" way
of doing things. I typically have both the stable and development
branches of GnuPG installed though, and 2.x installs an agent by
default.

The other front end you may want to look at is Kgpg. It's KDE, but runs
fine under Gnome complete with the little "task bar" applet that gives
you left click access just like PGP itself or WinPT. The only thing I
really had any issues with was it's built in editor. It had little
quirks like not being able to properly ID signed text unless the
'BEGIN' header was the first line on the page. I believe that was true
for the clipboard function too. You couldn't CTRL+A, CTRL+C to get
text to the clipboard much of the time, you had to be more selective.

On the plus side, Kgpg can install a pretty "billy goat" icon on your
desktop that you can drag files to have have them shredded. ;)

DISCLAIMER: Above gripes based on months+ old data. Things may have
changed, been fixed, etc. 

> 
> Also, I'd expect that if I tried GPA, for example.  then uninstalled
> it and tried seahorse, keyrings etc would be there as soon as
> installed, both should be looking for the standard GnuPG file
> locations, right?

GPA in particular is unobtrusive (another reason I like it). Seahorse
and Kgpg will diddle your gpg.config and/or other related configuration
files if you let them. If I remember correctly, Seahorse even installed
a second set of config files all for itself and went after my .bashrc,
which only made the problems with agent more perplexing. But none of
them has ever eaten my keys.

You should have backups in any case. And if you do start checking out
front ends you should definitely back up your configuration files. A
standard gpg.conf isn't rocket science, but it will make your life
easier if something changes a setting you later realize you want set
back or, eliminated.

Bottom line... it's probably going to be a matter of personal
preference in the end. I'd just go ahead and start with the one
that looked like it did everything I wanted. And there's really no
reason you can't have multiple front ends installed if you pay
attention to how they interact with your .conf files. Especially
Seahorse. ;)

-- 
     _ _      Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
    (o o)         Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
-oOO-(_)-OOo-------------------------------[ Groucho Marx ]---
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