A GUI alternative to Keytool

Do you also love command-line utilities with a million and one switches? I don't, though I admit they can be efficient. Keytool is Java's command-line tool for managing a keystore. A keystore holds keys and their associated certificates. Keytool lets you generate keys, import and export certificates, generate CSRs and do all sorts of other fun things. Of course, that accounts for all the switches. See the illustration.

I don't remember exactly whether I went looking for an alternative to Keytool out of sheer laziness or because I wanted inspiration from keystore-handling code (read: something to copy) for one of the tasks that had landed on my desk. Either way, I came across a fairly unassuming project called Portecle hosted on 
 SourceForge.

In the authors' words, Portecle is a “user friendly GUI application for creating, managing and examining keystores, keys, certificates, certificate requests, 
 certificate revocation lists and more.” All I can add is that it's been a long time since I came across such a handy 
 little program.

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Ordinary mortals can rejoice. Portecle supports most of what you need in everyday work with a 
 keystore and gives you a sensible GUI to boot. Here are some of the features Portecle offers.

• Create, load, save, and convert keystores.
• Generate DSA and RSA key pair entries with self-signed version 1 X.509 certificates.
• Import X.509 certificate files as trusted certificates.
• Import key pairs from PKCS #12 files.
• Clone and change the password of key pair entries and keystores.
• View the details of certificates contained within keystore entries, certificate files, and SSL/TLS connections.
• Export keystore entries in a variety of formats.
• Generate certification requests (CSRs).
• Import Certificate Authority (CA) replies.
• Change the password of key pair entries and keystores.
• Delete, clone, and rename keystore entries.
• View the details of certificate revocation list (CRL) files.