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Password manager pass and xterm

I use xterm as my terminal emulator and pass as my main password store. Usually xterm pastes from the primary selection (middle click or C-Insert). Read this thread for further information. I like xterms standard behavior as well and I am not willing to change it just to make it work with pass. To paste my passwords in xterm I use following workaround:

pass foobar/baz/bar | xclip

Above example pipes the output of pass (password for foobar/baz/bar in cleartext) to xclip, which writes it to the primary selection as default (man xclip). Middle click and C-Insert paste the password as expected.

Another solution is described in the ArchWiki:

export PASSWORD_STORE_X_SELECTION=primary

If you use this approach, pass -c will now copy to the primary selection but still outputs "Copied foobar/baz/bar to clipboard. Will clear in 45 seconds.".
Maybe I am going to work on a patch. An new option --primary would indeed be my favorite solution…


If you have any questions, suggestions, thoughts and comments please feel free to email me.


License of this blog post:

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


Published

Dec 12, 2017

Category

Computer

Tags

  • clipboard 2
  • command-line 7
  • pass 1
  • password 1
  • primary-selection 1
  • terminal 2
  • xterm 3

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