Encrypt Your Clipboard

By | May 15, 2012

Friends, you should encrypt. So, search for a nice tutorial about how to set up GPG for yourself and get to it. If you prefer to start out easily without learning to use gpg from the command line, Ubuntu/Mint/Debian all provide great GUI tools, such as the built in "Passwords And Keys" utility, easily found in your programs menu. Once you get GPG set up, you can start selecting/copying text and encrypting it very quickly with a handy bash alias. Add one like this (see below) to your bash profile, `source` it, and the next time you type “cryptclip” at the command prompt your clipboard will be replaced with the encrypted version of its former text.

When you have a working GPG setup, install the “xsel” utility if you don’t already have it. Then add this line to your bash profile:

alias cryptclip='xsel|gpg -ear your@gpgemailaddress.com|xsel --clipboard'