pgp-things: how to work with this and how to maintain a set of tools here ?

Good day dear experts hello everyone here. 😍

well - during the designingtasks i some times have some other things to do - answering mails and receiving keys etc. etx.  - 

well today i have a special topi: the question is: how to decrypt a pgp based messag !?

first of all i have to confess: i used pgp years ago .- long time not any more.

but yes - still do HAVE KEYS AND all that sort of things on my linux box - two days ago my friend send me a messsage that is necrypted: now i need to read the message.
do you suggest to use a so called pgp-tray to read the message -(/wheras i can import the keys etc.)

Hmm - well i really hope that i have been able to spell out what i need - and what is the case here

here some some thougths that you might understand my situation a bit better: i received an encrypted PGP message, and i still have some old keys on the Linux machine, but it’s been a while since i last used PGP. In other words i just basically want the simplest, safest way to decrypt and read the message.

what can be a good approach: i think that there are some methods, options ways here /(at least they come up to my thoughts):

a. decrypt the message

note my friend sent me a file, say message.asc, i can decrypt it with:

gpg --decrypt message.asc

and yes - here it comes - here it comes the difficult thing:  Well  i guess that GPG will ask me for the passphrase of the private key.

if all goes well i remember this - but duhhh - i guess i have forgotten the phrase: Well - if i can remember it -  then after entering it, the plaintext message will appear.

but again duuuhh - what if i do not know the passphrase right now - it i cant remember it - [shhhhhit   ]

and regarding the toolset: 

b. Optional – PGP Tray or GUI tools

in earlier times i d prefered something with a graphical interface rather than the command line:

b.1 Seahorse (GNOME key manager, integrates with GPG)

b2. PGP Tray (less common nowadays, but can still work)

well - these tools let us manage keys and decrypt messages through a tray icon or context menus. But hmmm - for a one-time read, gpg --decrypt is the most straightforward.
 

but - this does not help me - i need to remember the damned passphrase. 

what do i do if i cannot do htis - if i ve forgotten the phrase - then i guess - ill have to tell this my friend and i have to geneate new set of keys -

whats your opinion!!?

yours Saint_O🫠

greeting