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Comment by jsulak | Hacker News Reader

I prefer using a program like Password Safe (http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/), and use a safe password that's a long sentence (with punctuation). Then I can use arbitrarily long and complex passwords for all my accounts, and not have to worry about memorizing them individually. The password safe can even be synced across computers using Dropbox.

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I prefer KeePass simply because it's got implementations on multiple OSs, as does Dropbox (to sync the password database file). So I've got it on my iMac, Android phone, Windows laptop, and Windows work PC.

If you have an iPhone or don't want to use keepassx, you can use an online password manager like Passpack or Lastpass.

The downside is that you need to really trust the password manager, as they have all of your usernames and password.

1Password supports all those devices as well.

GPG-encrypted free-form file (though it's fairly structured), edited via vim and a well-known "auto-encrypt/decrypt GPG files" configuration: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Encryption

(Actually, from that page, vim now has built-in blowfish encryption, which I'll have to look at -- yet another argument in favor of sharing tips on the 'TarTubes: you may learn something even when you're sharing your own knowledge).

Erm: the blowfish encryption was in reference to the old '-x' vi encryption option (using a now pretty insecure Unix 'crypt' function).

A better "configure GPG edit mode" .vimrc is here: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Edit_gpg_encrypted_files

I believe that's based on the one first posted by Wouter Hanegraaff <wouter@blub.net>.

I prefer using a digital key that's always going to beat the entropy of the memorable passwords

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