A simple package for maintaining an encrypted private diary along with a non-encrypted one in Emacs
For this to work, you need GNU Emacs with the builtin EasyPG, along with the GNU Privacy Guard package. Installing GPG is out of the scope of this package, but it's very easy: https://gnupg.org .
Once you have GNU Privacy Guard installed, you merely need to move the private-diary.el into a directory that Emacs parses when loading the configuration files. For many people, this is ~/.emacs.d/ or if you use Prelude ~/.emacs.d/personal/ . Then you need to create a private diary file, encrypt it, and point the variable private-diary-file to it.
If you don't already have a personal secret key/public key pair, I suggest creating one with gpg for whatever email you typically use. If you're on a Unix or Unix-like system, this command should work in the terminal:
gpg --gen-key
It will walk you through generating your key. In general the defaults will work, as long as you have a key that can encrypt as well as sign. You can upload it to a public key-server, if you like.
Setting up the private-diary file is a matter of preference, but I create a text file with this header:
-*- mode: diary; epa-file-encrypt-to: ("youremail@replaceme.com"); -*-
This line tells Emacs to activate the diary-mode when opening the file and to encrypt the file with the private key at "youremail@replaceme.com", which should—of course—be the actual email associated with your private key above.
If you know about customize, you should already know how to do this, if not hit M-x and type "customize." You should be able to search for the variable and set it to wherever you put the file.
Simple call the function "swap-diary-and-private-diary" and you can use it like you would the diary function associated with the calendar on Emacs. If you're unfamiliar with this, hit M-x, type "swap-diary-and-private-diary", you should see a message in the minibuffer telling you the two files, then hit M-x, type "calendar", pick a day, hit 'i', and it should insert that day into the file. Once it has encrypted the file, after the first usage, it should also prompt you for your password.
When you're done with your private diary, hit M-x, type "swap-diary-and-private-diary" and it will switch them back.
Please contact James P. Ascher who currently maintains this package. I'd welcome any additions, suggestions, changes, or anything else.
This project was coded as part of James P. Ascher's experience in 2015-16 Praxis Fellowship at the Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia and is gratefully advised, assisted, and inspired by his collaborators: Scott Bailey, Jeremy Boggs, Chris Gist, Wayne Graham, Ronda Grizzle, Purdom Lindblad, Laura Miller, Eric Rochester, Ammon Shepherd, Shane Lin, Lydia Warren, Gillet Rosenblith, Bremen Donovan, Ethan Reed, Rachel Trapp, and Brandon Walsh.
Eric Rochester deserves particular thanks for nourishing an unhealthy interest in Emacs and org-mode, as well as literate programming, that helped provide my motivation to do this work.