Managing Passwords in Emacs
Posted by Doug Fri, 11 Apr 2003 15:44:00 GMT
I have a lot of userids and passwords for all the various hosts I have access and web sites I use. I’m sure everyone does. I was using Figaro’s Password Manager. It was pretty nice, but simple. Basically, it’s a Gtk+ app that has categories. Each password has a name, url, username, password, and some notes. It also has the ability to launch the url (or ssh terminal if that was needed); however, I never used that. The main problem is that fpm was orphaned in Debian. This means with the next stable release of Debian GNU/Linux it will be dropped. I read the package maintainer’s comments on why he dropped it. It sounds like fpm has some bugs (and maybe even some security bugs) but the maintainer has pretty much dropped the package too. In the spirit of all-thing-in-emacs, I just decided to store my passwords in a plain text file on my hard drive and use gnupgp to encrypt it. Emacs uses mailcrypt as an interface to gpg. I pretty much follwed Charles Sebold’s advice for setting up Emacs:AutoEncryption. Using a plain text file obviously gives me a lot more flexibility in how I organize the data; however, it also means I need to becareful to maintain some order as well. The only thing missing at this point was fpm’s handy feature for generating new random passwords. So, I wrote Emacs:PasswordGenerator. This allows you to specify how long the password should be, and what type of characters are allowed. All in all, this is a pretty good solution.
