Vim

Microsoft earned itself the rather descriptive name ‘Microslop’ in recent months, on account of having infested virtually all its products with ‘AI’/Co-Pilot stuff that nobody asked for and few want. It’s especially insidious and invasive enough in Windows 11 that one shouldn’t expect any privacy when using it. Visual Studio Code was a decent editor that I’d been using since Atom got deprecated. Now it’s primarily an ‘open source AI code editor’, its official Web site declares.

It is possible to save the content of a Vim session as an encrypted file, simply by using the ‘:X’ command and setting a password. The problem is the default encryption mode is considered weak - PkZip is a stream cipher that XORs the password with the file content, and the first Blowfish implementation for Vim can have repeating bytes in the ciphertext (see ‘:help cryptmethod’). Using the default mode, we get the following message: