If the author really wants this on disk, would application-level encryption of the files it is writing to /tmp be overkill?
The standard trick with encrypted swap on Linux is to pull an encryption key out of /dev/urandom on boot and never store it anywhere. I suspect libVTE could do something similar without a lot of code, though it would be a bit strange for a terminal emulator to depend on crypto libraries.
Yes, that's what I want to do. My main goal redesigning the buffer was to 1) fix memory fragmentation, 2) make unlimited scrollback possible. I offered to find some time on a weekend to add a caching layer, a compression layer, and an encryption layer. But the author of that report was more interested in getting publicity I guess, so ignored my offer and made it look like I said I won't fix this. Well, NOW it's harder to justify taking time off my personal life to work on this...
The standard trick with encrypted swap on Linux is to pull an encryption key out of /dev/urandom on boot and never store it anywhere. I suspect libVTE could do something similar without a lot of code, though it would be a bit strange for a terminal emulator to depend on crypto libraries.