Because it’s bad, prone to errors, user interface is poor and relies on you following your process perfectly every time.

Bitwarden.

Or KeePass.

You can. You can also light your house with just candles. Its just not a very efficient or effective way of doing it and you lose out on modern features.

There’s two avenues for opening an encrypted file, attacking the password/access method or attacking the encryption itself.

Generally using a basic zip-lock is not going to have a second factor, a rate limiting mechanism, anything really other than the password to stop a random brute force effort if they got a hold of the file for local processing.

Using something with some front end protection like bit warden with 2FA or keepass with the key file option added in makes it more a task of going after the crypto itself which is a much much harder approach.

If you do this, you’ll start writing small scripts to help you with repeating tasks, to simplify somethings, then you’ll start looking for help trying to improve those scripts, then you’ll find better written and tested ones and start replacing yours with those, one by one. Then you’ll probably find pass or other terminal password manager. It can be a fun learning experience but sooner or later you’ll end up using a password manager.

I use KeePassXC

It stores your passwords in an encrypted file, then i use the random password generator, the browser extension and free phone apps to autofill everything.

(It is up to you to sync the file between devices)

Depends against whom you are protecting yourself. If it’s against

• your younger sibling then it’s probably sufficient
• some script kiddie or scammer running scripts against the most typical setups, might be just obscure enough
• a proper targeted attack, then it will depend on which zip software you are using. Most likely the stock one that might (I didn’t bother checking) relying on something that is far from the state of the art in terms of encryption. In that case it will most likely not be secure.
• a proper attack but you use something like 7z with encryption that is relatively resilient, then most like if you are not facing state actors with huge amount of resources to try to crack it, most likely secure

Note I’m NOT a security expert so… don’t believe me.

You can develop apps in a text editor. We don’t do it because we’ve got better tools. Text editor work but developer focused IDE’s work much better and are very convenient.

it may encrypt your password but using kdbx files are much more convenient, efficient, etc.

If your goal is to “self-host” a password manager, you might as well use Keepass + SyncThing.

• free software
• master password protected
• has organization and auto-fill features
• can sync across multiple devices

Usually the downfall of rolling your own password manager is it’s easier to make mistakes and accidentally lock yourself out. Or if you don’t keep backups/replicas then you could easily lose your passwords.

Zip uses very bad encryption that is vulnerable to a known plaintext attack. Do not ever use PKZIP encryption for any purpose https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack

Very bad, because the usability of such a scheme would be a nightmare. If you have to unzip the files every time you need a password, that’d be a huge burden. Not to mention that unzipping it all would leave the files there, unprotected, until you delete them again (if you remember deleting them in the first place). If you do leave the plaintext files around, and only encrypt & zip for backing up, that’s worse than just using the plaintext files in the backup too, because it gives you a false sense of security. You want to minimize the amount of time passwords are in the clear.

Just use a password manager like Bitwarden. Simpler, more practical, more secure.

Bad UX and lack of any integration like autofill or autotype, thats it.

I guess it would work, as long as you’re using an up to date zip implementation with AES-256 encryption. I guess my question would be why bother? Being compressed doesn’t add any real additional benefit, since just using text shouldn’t take up much space.

Is recommend just using an actual password manager for convenience, since you aren’t really gaining any security by only storing your passwords in a file.

Files in archives upon being opened are temporarily extracted, which means your passwords there exist as plaintext files. If your system is secure and hardened enough against unauthorised %temp% access on Windows, probably it can work.