orhun's blog
GnuPG is a well-known implementation of the OpenPGP standard which is been used for years in various communities and projects. It’s also known as “GPG”, which is the name of the command line tool that makes it easier to integrate with other applications. It is battle-tested over the years and has a wealth of frontend applications and libraries.
My past with GnuPG is roughly the same with an ordinary developer who is into programming, open source, and related concepts. So I cannot say that I was using it for more than encryption/decryption/verification of files/emails and different types of authentication. It is a tool basically for securing the communication for me.
But some things about gpg, the CLI tool, were bugging me. I remember times that I have to run multiple commands to get fully informed about a key. Or I have to process its output to get the information that I needed. (using grep, sed, etc.) Not to mention that some of the output of gpg is quite confusing if you’re unfamiliar with the GnuPG terms. So for years, I was thinking that it’d be nice to have a more user-friendly and interactive tool to handle the tasks that gpg is trying to accomplish. These tasks include key management operations such as listing (showing subkeys, user ids, signatures), signing, deleting keys, etc.
GPGME uses GnuPG’s OpenPGP backend as default to provide a high-level crypto API for various operations including key management, which was the thing I needed. And I have written a TUI program using tui-rs before, so why not use it again?
