How to easily install any GPG GUI on Ubuntu that actually works?

Question

I am trying to install any GnuPG GUI for easy encryption/decryption of text, and I feel like I am in bizarro world where nothing works at all. On Mac OS X, I use GPGTools and it works flawlessly, so I thought it will be similar on Ubuntu, but no such luck so far.

What I tried so far:

• GPA - it just starts, shows no less than 3 error messages on top of each other, and does nothing (doesn't even displays the keys I imported into gpg through bash).
• KGPG - install tons of KDE packages through apt-get, and then it never starts anyway. I managed to get it to start once, but never again.
• Seahorse - finally something that actually starts and shows my keys, but I can't find a way to do anything with them (encrypt or decrypt). Nothing shows up in any Nautilus menu. I have installed gedit-plugins, but nothing like GPG or Seahorse plugin shows up in gedit plugin list.

What are my other options?

(Note: I specifically don't want to use a mail client with GPG supoprt, I just want to encrypt and decrypt text files.)

Solution

Besides Seahorse, which is only the key manager, you need a package called seahorse-nautilus to be able to encrypt/decrypt files with Nautilus.

It adds a menu item to the right-click context menu that allows you to encrypt a file directly from the file manager.

Note: This is the package name in Ubuntu 14.04. Other versions may have a different package name.

Additional Note: It may be required to log out of the current session and re-login for everything to work properly after installing the required packages.

Comments

[Thomas Ward]

There is Kleopatra, but I've not tested it on Ubuntu. There's also gpg4usb which I've used to encrypt/decrypt messages, but I store my private keys on an encrypted USB drive inside gpg4usb for those purposes.

[unor]

See also on Software Recommendations: GnuPG-aware GUI to encrypt/decrypt PGP ASCII on Linux, where pyrite was recommended.

[e-sushi]

gnupg.org/software/frontends.html

[Karel Bílek]

Unfortunately this is 2014 question, I moved back to Mac in 2019.

[Okänd]

sure, but for others who end up here thanks to google it might be useful

[Karel Bílek]

yep, it might! I just cannot accept/vote