two others: oplop and vim -x

Specifically, only use vim encryption in vim >= 7.3 (upstream released it in Aug 2010, so e.g. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS definitely doesn't have it). Earlier versions of Vim use a cryptographically unsound encryption scheme, new versions use Blowfish. Also you need to set the right Vim options to prevent information leaks; e.g.

set nobackup
set noswapfile
set nowritebackup
set viminfo=

I suspect noswapfile isn't needed if the announcement I just looked up is correct [1], but without set viminfo= I definitely got information leaks into ~/.viminfo , even though the tutorial Google found [2] fails to mention that. Has anyone thoroughly examined vim to give us a way to confidently use vim encryption securely?

But on the plus side, I predict this Vim feature will still be here in ten years, and I have no confidence that the popular GUI password-specific programs will be the same ones by then...

[1] https://groups.google.com/group/vim_announce/browse_threa... linked from vim.org, except that Google claims that vim-announce violated its TOS rather than showing me the message (?!) so I found something on archive.org that looks like it's the announcement, http://web.archive.org/web/20110103012145/https://groups....

[2] http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/security/vim-offers-stro...