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Eugene's Space

Improving my password management with pass

I’ve been a long time user of Bitwarden bitwarden emoji, and it’s been a fascinating experience. But it’s time to switch to a more based and minimal password manager - pass.

Bitwarden bitwarden emoji

Bitwarden is one of the greatest password managers out there - it’s open source and can be self-hosted, it is available as browser extension and an mobile app, there’s also a CLI for it. This is the password manager I can trust enough to actually recommend to my friends. But for my personal use, it’s time to say goodbye to Bitwarden since I’m switching to a more minimal pass.

Pass

Pass by ZX2C4 (the same guy who wrote cgit) is so simple that it’s not even funny. This is when you realize how little is needed to actually meet requirements of a good password manager. But here’s what I’d highlight about pass:

  1. GnuPG for encryption
  2. Plain Unix directory structure
  3. Built-in git support (USE=git)

Migrating passwords from Bitwarden

There are tons of import utilities featured on the pass website, and all major password managers are supported. I just exported my Bitwarden data and had my ~/.password-store/ ready in a couple of seconds. I haven’t yet come up with a proper directory organization, but for now I just put everything web-related under www/ directory.

Pass menu

On Gentoo enabling USE=dmenu will add a passmenu binary that is a simple dmenu script. It’s mega useful - there’s no quicker way to search & copy your password than this.

Browser extension

Firefox browser extension (pass-ff) works great on my Librewolf librewolf emoji. Unfortunately there’s no USE=librewolf flag for www-plugins/passff-host (although upstream supports it) so I had to manually symlink /usr/lib64/mozilla/native-messaging-hosts -> /usr/lib64/librewolf/native-messaging-hosts/

The GUI could be a bit better but it does the job and that’s all that matters. Autofill works perfectly.

Android application

I was always concerned about the experience on my Android phone. But turns out it’s not so bad - installing OpenKeyChain to manage my GPG key and Android Password Store as the pass client yields a pretty good UX for me. In some cases I find that this app works even better than Bitwarden for Android - autofill stuff takes less time to appear and is much more consistent.

Conclusion

I’m happy I made this switch. This is yet another tiny improvement in my daily toolbox 🛠️ that will make my workflows a bit more comfy and suck less.