How to create a new 'secure scratchpad' buffer?

Question

I want to be able to create a new buffer (and a new window with which to interact with it) to work with secret or sensitive info, e.g. passwords.

Ideally, none of the contents of the buffer would persist after it's closed or discarded. It'd probably be best if the contents are discarded too even when the last window for the buffer is closed. If possible, it'd be best if any in-memory copies of the buffer are 'wiped' when it's closed as well.

The gnupg.vim plugin claims:

The script turns off viminfo and swapfile to increase security.

So doing both seems necessary, tho perhaps not sufficient. What else should I do?

Answer 1

In this case i would

:new
:setlocal buftype=nofile
:setlocal bufhidden=hide
:setlocal noswapfile

buftype=nofile does not associate the buffer with a file.

noswapfile does not create a swapfile.

bufhidden=hide hides the buffer, when its windows is closed.

Vim discards the content in the buffer on exit without warning.

If you like to clear it before, you can use :bw to wipe the buffer.

There also is a plugin for that, however, I haven't tried this one.

I would also like to add, that I'm not a security expert, and there conceivably are a number of ways to access that information.