[New Plugin] EncTags — inline text encryption via ^^...^^ tags

saintleningrad-prog

Hi everyone,

I built a small plugin called EncTags. It lets you encrypt a fragment
of text right inside any file, using a simple ^^…^^ tag format,
without touching the rest of the file.

Repo: https://github.com/saintleningrad-prog/enctags-npp

How it works:

Select text, or place the cursor inside a ^^…^^ tag, press
Ctrl+Shift+E
Raw ^^some text^^ gets encrypted into ^^L1:base64…^^
Cursor on an encrypted tag decrypts it back, with a password prompt
Nothing happens automatically on open, save, or close, every
action is explicit

Crypto: AES-256-GCM + PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 (100k iterations), via
Windows CNG (bcrypt.dll), no third-party crypto library.

The tag format is intentionally simple and documented in the README,
so a tag can be decrypted outside the plugin too (Python, a browser
script, anything that implements the same AES-GCM parameters).

This is an early release (v0.2.0), built with help from an AI
assistant for both the design and the C++ implementation. I would
appreciate any feedback, especially on the Notepad++/Scintilla
integration, whether the notification handling and buffer position
tracking is done correctly, and whether the approach makes sense
from a plugin-architecture standpoint.

Thanks for reading.

PeterJones

@saintleningrad-prog ,

I had not really thought about embedding encrypted text inside another otherwise unencrypted file. Do you have a specific use case, or example use-cases, in mind?

In my opinion, all-or-nothing with encryption generally seems sufficient.

rdipardo

@saintleningrad-prog said:

Select text, or place the cursor inside a ^^…^^ tag, press
Ctrl+Shift+E

Just a head’s up: that’s the same default key combination that decodes HTML entities when HTML Tag is installed.

Since plugin commands are mapped in alphabetical order, and the most recent mapping prevails, having both installed will silently block the EncTag’s plugin shortcut from functioning:

One more thing: the text you are passing to the About message box (here) contains the literal Unicode character U+2013: EN DASH. Since the Unicode literal is inside a character string, the compiler interprets everything between "..." as if it were encoded in the operating system’s default, single-byte code page (usually Windows-1252 on English- or European-language PCs). When shown, the emdash becomes the string of nonsensical bytes \xe2\x80\x94:

You just need to escape the Unicode literal, i.e., "Ctrl+Shift+E \u2013 ..."