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by animalnewbie 2278 days ago
Sometimes you don't want minimalist- you want to quickly find and visualise things.

What I'd love is a Tui "curses" interface to keepassdb with quick vim like navigation. GUI is both too heavy and not too keyboard friendly.

In fact, unless there's a specific (and specified) reason, all password managers should be based on the somewhat de facto standard of keepassdb

2 comments

If I have a keyboard, then for a relatively small dataset, such as my saved passwords, I prefer a text file over any database. Lookup workflow: decrypt file (with, say, gpg), find what I want (with, say, grep), delete decrypted file. (Not safe if you don't use disk encryption!) Update workflow: decrypt file, edit file, encrypt file, commit encrypted file to local git repo, git push to backup storage.
That sounds like a lot of work... I am entering passwords on websites 10-30 times a day... that would add up.
The 'Pass' password manager is just bash wrapper for this. It comes with 'passmenu' which is a very simple script that pipes the list of passwords to dmenu & handles the decryption using gpg. I just have a keybinding to launch it so I can copy & insert a password into any application in seconds.

[1] https://www.passwordstore.org/

You're describing the behavior of https://www.passwordstore.org/ almost exactly! Give it a try.
There's a vim extension that automatically decrypts files with gpg extension on open and encrypts them on save. If you use gpg agent, this is pretty painless.

Just be careful about leaking to .viminfo file. :)

Perhaps of you pipe it into vim (i.e. | vim - ), it'd be somewhat safer and less manual work.
It's not a TUI but I have used kpcli (http://kpcli.sourceforge.net/) as a method to access keepass databases over SSH and text interfaces. I've thought about building a more TUI-based option but have yet to get around to it.
Is this still being maintained? It's a great idea but the Keepass database format has been evolving (we're on version 4.x now) and I don't want to use unmaintained software to manage my passwords.