Dotenv Mask Editor: No more embarrassing screen leaks of your .env
Details
- External ID
- 46713473
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Dotenv Mask Editor: No more embarrassing screen leaks of your .env
- Website domain
- visualstudio.com
- Launched
- Jan. 22, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 28
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7002635046113307
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hi HN,I built this because I often work in coworking spaces or do screen sharing, and I've always had this fear of accidentally flashing my .env file with production secrets to the whole room (or recording).It’s a simple VS Code extension that opens .env files in a custom grid editor. It automatically masks any value longer than 6 characters so I can safely open the file to check keys without exposing the actual secrets.It runs 100% locally with zero dependencies (I know how sensitive these files are). It just reads the file, renders the grid, and saves it back as standard text.It's open source (MIT) and I'd love any feedback on the masking logic or other features that would make it safer to use.Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=xinbenlv... Github https://github.com/xinbenlv/dotenv-mask-editor
Enrichment
- Theme
- self-hosted infrastructure and security tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- mask sensitive environment variables from screenshots
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a standard VS Code extension using the Custom Editor API to display key-value pairs from .env files in a masked UI grid.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: direnv, Vault, AWS SSM, pass (password manager), Postman
Concerns raised: Production secrets shouldn't be in .env files at all, Masking is a band-aid, not proper secret management, Doesn't prevent npm packages from reading env files, Scope too narrow - problem extends beyond .env to configs, databases, terminals, browser tabs, Better to use local dev stack with dummy credentials instead
Feature requests: Support masking beyond .env files (YAML, JSON, TOML, database GUIs, API tools, terminals), Detect secrets across multiple applications during screen sharing, More sophisticated secret detection beyond pattern matching
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 49 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #24 of 50 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 62 days after the earliest competitor.
- I just fixed .env once and for all · hn · 2025-11-23 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- better-env · hn · 2025-11-23 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- KeyEnv · hn · 2026-01-18 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- enveil · hn · 2026-02-24 · 201 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- SecretEnv · hn · 2026-05-05 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- SnapEnv · ph · 2026-09-14 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Claude Code for Visual Studio (native diff with accept/reject) · hn · 2026-06-15 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- I built a tool to un-dumb Claude Code's CLI output (Local Log Viewer) · hn · 2026-02-13 · 69 upvotes · similarity 0.35
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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