EasyPG is a (built in) gpg encryption package for emacs. It allows you, for instance, to automatically (by default) encrypt on save/decrypt on open files with a .gpg extension. Its usefulness cannot be underestimated. I recently obtained a PC with OS X installed on it, and emacs would hang when trying to open .gpg files, with “Decrypting /path/to/file.gpg…0%” showing in the minibuffer. It turns out that with gnupg installed from ports, gpg would background a pinentry-ncurses process to take a decryption password from the user....