I cannot help you with 1, or 3 since I do not use these programs. As for 2, and 4, what exactly did you run? What are you exactly trying to do?
If you just want to sign a file, $ gpg --clearsign FILE Or for encryption, $ gpg --output FILE.gpg --encrypt --recipient PEOPLE FILE #2 after upgrading thunderbird to version 31.0 I could install the enigmail add-on but HTML in emails didn't work anymore. Took al while to figure that enigmail has disabled it. After that thunderbird was asking for the gpg passphrase almost for every email even though I told it t do that only every 600 minutes. I would recommend gpg-agent, which is distributed with gpg, instead. See https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg/Invoking-GPG_002dAGENT.html You might want to read both the GPG Privacy Guard manual (https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg/) and the GNU Privacy Guard Handbook (https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html) in solitude and try to understand how GPG works.
