emanote VS git-crypt

Im personally using Emanote which does exactly what you describe. It supports LaTeX and lots of other features via Pandoc. Its also very nice to use in that it supports hot-reloading, instead of requiring manual refreshing. The only downside for some might be that its installed via the Nix ecosystem which is (great but) a bit of a rabbit hole you might not want to deal with, particularly depending on your level of technicality on the computer.

Have you considered neuron or it's successor emanote?

Emanote! Very lightweight. One of the things I can't stand about Notion is its speed.

Also, I'm willing to mentor anyone who is interested in improving Ema or Emanote.

Clarification: Emanote is a successor to Neuron, and written on top of Ema.

I use obsidian (previously just vim) and emanote (previously neuron) to compile some (but not all) of my notes to a static site.

I maintain an extended version of Emanote in Haskell (as an Ema app) that does custom stuff like visualize my hledger transactions, track time, generate invoice and provide custom views of my Markdown notebook, like a Twitter-like timeline generated from H2 headings (with date) from across notes.

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 This also means a user could roll the repository back before a key was revoked and steal the symmetric key used to protect the repository and then use that key to decrypt the repository any time in the future.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

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

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.

How about encryption?

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

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!

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

The most interesting approach I've seen for this is https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt

Here is the Makefile.