dotfiles VS git-crypt

Compare dotfiles vs git-crypt and see what are their differences.

dotfiles

My configuration files and personal collection of scripts. (by BurntSushi)
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dotfiles git-crypt
19 54
165 8,850
2.4% 1.1%
8.4 2.6
2 days ago 9 months ago
Vim Script C++
- GNU General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

dotfiles

Posts with mentions or reviews of dotfiles. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-03-19.
  • fd: A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find'
    23 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Mar 2025
    Oh man that's nowhere near fair! ripgrep is one tiny little command that is mostly compatible with GNU grep. Lots of the flags are the same. And its default usage is really easy: `rg whatever`.

    But I gave it ten minutes and ported part of https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/bedf3598f2501ad5... to https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/bedf3598f2501ad5...

    Not much, but it took me some time to get the basics down.

    One thing that stood out to me was that startup times are kinda brutal. I'm not sure if that's intended or if it's something about my environment:

        $ cat /tmp/murex-test
  • Ugrep – a more powerful, ultra fast, user-friendly, compatible grep
    27 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Dec 2023
    So ired is a toy. One wonders how many search results you've missed over the years because of ired's feature "it's so minimal that it's wrong!" I mean sometimes tools have bugs. ripgrep has had bugs too. But this one has been in ired since 2009.

    What is it that you said? YIKES. Yeah. Seems appropriate.

    [1]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/eace294fd80bfde1...

    [2]: https://github.com/radare/ired/blob/a1fa7904e6ad239dde950de5...

  • Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen 7040 Series Makes for a Great Linux Laptop
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Nov 2023
    I've been using X11 on my Framework laptop for years. No desktop environment at all. Just my regulard old school window manager[1]. No KDE or GNOME. But also no XFCE.

    The only thing I had to do to get scaling working for me was set two environment variables[2].

    I was indeed worried about this when I bought the laptop. Prior to this, I avoided anything with resolutions higher than 1920x1200. But it turned out that everything mostly worked with a couple tweaks.

    I think the only real issue I've run into is `git gui`. As I understand it, the GUI toolkit it uses doesn't support scaling? Not sure. I ended up working around it by just increasing font sizes. I suppose this exposes the weakness that is probably impacting you: the scaling on my laptop is being done by the GUI toolkits, not the display server or compositor. (I don't always run a compositor, but when I do, I use `picom`. Mostly just to avoid tearing.)

    [1]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo

    [2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/ea3a88e6160f4244...

  • Docfd 0.8.5 TUI fuzzy document finder
    2 projects | /r/commandline | 20 May 2023
    Here's a really simple example: https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/214aab9fdc45e7a507d41b564a1136eea9b298c9/bin/pre-rg
  • What setup do you use to program in rust?
    5 projects | /r/rust | 3 May 2023
    The full details of my setup (and more) are here: https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles
  • Fastest XML node parsing library in Rust
    2 projects | /r/rust | 8 Apr 2023
    If it turns out to be the library (I'd wager not, 4 minutes feels excessive), then you could give roxmltree a try. This program deals with about 7GB of XML (my SMS history for the past few years) in about 15 seconds.
  • Do people write whole APIs in Rust?
    2 projects | /r/rust | 2 Apr 2023
    Did you try roxmltree? It worked really well for me and was quite fast: https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/90f2acf2f45548ca0ff2da827f3108be0a965b74/bin/rust/searchsms/main.rs
  • would you use rust for scripting?
    6 projects | /r/rust | 20 Mar 2023
    find-invalid-utf8: walks a directory tree and prints invalid UTF-8 in files using nice hex escapes with coloring. This is useful for honing on in where invalid UTF-8 occur. You have a good bet of finding some by checking out any moderately sized repository of code. The Linux kernel used to have some. The Mozilla repo does. The CPython repo does too. This is why it's important for CLI tools to deal with invalid UTF-8 gracefully in some way.
  • What are some less popular but well-made crates you'd like others to know about?
    12 projects | /r/rust | 8 Jan 2023
    Yeah it's great! I used it to implement a little utility to convert a subset of SMS/MMS messages from an XML backup to a more readable plain text version: https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/0b075d79a6ff8812a1f48a37b9858938b3eadc58/bin/rust/searchsms/main.rs
  • Ask HN: Can I see your scripts?
    73 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Aug 2022

git-crypt

Posts with mentions or reviews of git-crypt. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-11-26.
  • Git-crypt – transparent file encryption in Git
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Nov 2024
    Git-crypt is a dead product with numerous unresolved issues and drawbacks.

    Newer versions of git cause git to crash when invoking git-crypt[0].

    It doesn’t scale with users: Off-boarding a key is a commit in git. Since it is trivially easy to rewind a git repo before the revocation commit and then decrypt with the revoked key, this means you need to rotate every key under management when any revoke is performed.

    It provides the illusion of asymmetric key encryption, but your asymmetric key wraps a shared symmetric key used to encrypt the entire repository. This also means a user could roll the repository back before a key was revoked and steal the symmetric key used to protect the repository and then use that key to decrypt the repository any time in the future.

    It doesn’t scale with the number of files under management. As a result of how it’s implemented, every invocation is a separate process launch. This means every file triggers an asymmetric unwrap of the symmetric key. If you’re protecting your GPG key with hardware keyfob, decrypting the repository will take a long time.

    This product was cool for a while but is flawed… do yourself a favor: Mozilla’s SOPS is better when coupled with something like AWS KMS.

    [0] https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt/issues/273

  • Ask HN: How do you share and sync .env files and secrets with your team
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Sep 2024
    Years ago, before going full on Vault, I was using git-crypt, a git plugin that uses gpg to encrypt files before committing them to the repo.

    Not sure if it’s still fine, I see their last release is 2 years old nowadays.

    https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt

  • Age is a simple, modern and secure file encryption tool, format, and Go library
    20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Aug 2024
  • Why Can't My Mom Email Me?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Apr 2024
  • Is it safe to commit a Terraform file to GitHub?
    4 projects | /r/Terraform | 24 Jun 2023
    Apart from a few exceptions (like ansible for example, which supports native encryption), we moved away from encrypted secrets in git repos and use external things, depending on the platform (like parameter store / secrets manager for AWS or keyvault for Azure - both of these do track changes, btw), so I haven't looked for quite a while. Back in ye olden days we used https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt which worked quite nicely, but the key management is cumbersome and it's based on GPG, which in itself is a bit of a light redish flag these days.
  • GitHub Private Repos Considered Private-­Ish
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jun 2023
    How about encryption?

    https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt has been solid for me

  • Codeship jet alternative
    1 project | /r/webdev | 18 May 2023
    You might want to check out git-crypt. It allows you to encrypt and decrypt files in a git repo without needing an external account, and supports .env files. That said, trying your hand at making one as a personal project could be a fun and rewarding experience!
  • Ask HN: Privacy-Conscious GitHub?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2023
    I hesitate to append this but one option I have seen thrown around and also debated is git-crypt [1] There are many caveats to doing this as any integrations that would need to read the file contents would also need to be able to decrypt the files so this may not be entirely useful and may add many levels of complexity and fragility.

    [1] - https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt

  • Vaults vs. Cryptomator? Security, Cloud syncing, integration?
    2 projects | /r/kde | 30 Mar 2023
    The most interesting approach I've seen for this is https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt
  • How can I Make this binary statically-linked?
    1 project | /r/learnprogramming | 9 Feb 2023
    Here is the Makefile.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing dotfiles and git-crypt you can also consider the following projects:

rust-script - Run Rust files and expressions as scripts without any setup or compilation step.

sops - Simple and flexible tool for managing secrets

nocode - The best way to write secure and reliable applications. Write nothing; deploy nowhere.

age - A simple, modern and secure encryption tool (and Go library) with small explicit keys, no config options, and UNIX-style composability.

dotfiles - @holman does dotfiles

emanote - Emanate a structured view of your plain-text notes

InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
featured
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com
featured

Did you know that Vim Script is
the 35th most popular programming language
based on number of references?