filosottile/age

age is a file encryption tool that makes encrypting and decrypting files as simple as possible. The goal is a tool with no configuration files, no settings to tune, and no complicated options, just a clean command you run to lock or unlock a file. The way it works: you generate a key pair using age-keygen, which gives you a private key and a short public key (a string starting with "age1..."). To encrypt a file, you specify the recipient's public key, only the person with the matching private key can decrypt it. You can encrypt to multiple recipients at once, so several different people can all decrypt the same file. As an alternative to key pairs, you can also encrypt with a passphrase if you just want to protect a file with a password. age follows the UNIX philosophy of composability, it reads from standard input and writes to standard output by default, so you can pipe it with other tools like tar to compress and encrypt in one step. It also supports SSH public keys as recipients, meaning you can use existing SSH keys without generating new ones. For future-proofing, age supports post-quantum keys, cryptography designed to remain secure even if large quantum computers are built. An armor mode encodes the encrypted output as text (PEM format) for situations where you need to send it somewhere that only accepts text. You would use age when you need to encrypt a file before storing it or sending it, simpler than configuring GPG, and designed to be hard to misuse. The tool is written in Go and installable via most major package managers including Homebrew, apt, pacman, winget, and many others. The full README is longer than what was provided.