Edit a file through an on-the-fly encryption stream in Unix

Question

Okay this is a weird sort of question. I might get down-voted for being stupid here.

I'd like to be able to edit an encrypted file, but without having to manually decrypt it to a location on the disk.

I see the workflow going something like this:

• I type a unix command, naming the encrypted file to edit
• I enter the password to decrypt the file stream
• A graphical editor opens containing the decrypted version of the file
• I can edit the file, and whenever I save it gets encrypted on the fly back into the encrypted file
• When I close the editor, only the encrypted file remains

I kinda thought it should be possible to get an editor to talk to an on-the-fly encryption stream but think it was talking to a normal file. Something like:

$ sublime-text | open-gpg-stream my-encrypted-file.gpg
password: 

Is this possible? Or is my understanding just way off? If this isn't possible, could you please explain why it's not possible?

Answer 1

It’s not a weird question, but you might do better simply looking for an editor that already, natively, does what you want.  For example, vi and vim do.  Just don’t post a question to Super User asking, “Where can I buy …?”

Failing that, can you wrap your favorite graphical (but encryption-unaware) editor in a script that handles the encryption part?  I understand that you don’t want to write the file to disk in the clear –– but can you decrypt the file and write it to a tmpfs file system (RAM disk) or an encrypted file system?