Aquamacs 3.6 Hangs When Saving An Encrypted File
May 25, 2023
In the evening I wanted to save an encrypted text file I had open in
Aquamacs version 3.6 on my Mac mini. This somehow hung up Aquamacs until I pressed C-g. After some Googling I found a
solution:
downgrade GNU Privacy Guard from version 2.4.1 back to version 2.4.0.
First I verified that I indeed was running 2.4.1 which seems to cause this issue in Emacs and hence Aquamacs:
rhea:~ john$ gpg2 --version
gpg (GnuPG) 2.4.1
libgcrypt 1.10.2
Copyright (C) 2023 g10 Code GmbH
License GNU GPL-3.0-or-later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Home: /Users/john/.gnupg
Supported algorithms:
Pubkey: RSA, ELG, DSA, ECDH, ECDSA, EDDSA
Cipher: IDEA, 3DES, CAST5, BLOWFISH, AES, AES192, AES256, TWOFISH,
CAMELLIA128, CAMELLIA192, CAMELLIA256
Hash: SHA1, RIPEMD160, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, SHA224
Compression: Uncompressed, ZIP, ZLIB, BZIP2
I am using Mac Ports so I read how to install an older version of a port which turned out to be easy.
First, I checked if the older port was still installed using: port installed gnupg2. This reported:
The following ports are currently installed:
gnupg2 @2.2.15_0+openldap+pinentry_mac
gnupg2 @2.2.16_0+openldap+pinentry_mac
gnupg2 @2.2.17_0+openldap+pinentry_mac
gnupg2 @2.2.23_0+openldap+pinentry_mac
gnupg2 @2.2.25_0+openldap+pinentry_mac
gnupg2 @2.2.34_0+openldap+pinentry_mac
gnupg2 @2.2.36_0+openldap+pinentry_mac
gnupg2 @2.4.0_0+openldap+pinentry_mac
gnupg2 @2.4.1_0+openldap+pinentry_mac (active)
Next, I activated the previous version of GNU Privacy Guard using:
rhea:~ john$ sudo port activate gnupg2 @2.4.0_0+openldap+pinentry_mac
---> Computing dependencies for gnupg2
---> Deactivating gnupg2 @2.4.1_0+openldap+pinentry_mac
---> Cleaning gnupg2
---> Activating gnupg2 @2.4.0_0+openldap+pinentry_mac
---> Cleaning gnupg2
Finally, I verified that I now could save the file encrypted. And indeed saving the file worked without any problems.