About

An extension for password-store that copies the password and additional metadata (e.g. login name) into separate X selections.

Defaults:

• password: PASSWORD_STORE_X_SELECTION=clipboard (default in pass), paste with CTRL-V (most GUIs) or CTRL-Shift-V (most shells)
• metadata: PASSWORD_STORE_X_SELECTION_META=primary (this extension), paste with middle mouse button or Shift-Insert

See below for more on X selections.

pass insert foo creates a one-line password file $PASSWORD_STORE_DIR/foo.gpg, whose decrypted content is the password:

passzzwoo00rrd11!!1!!

A common use case is to copy this using pass show -c foo (or just pass -c foo, show is default) into the Clipboard X selection.

pass also supports multiple lines (pass insert -m foo) in which the password is on the first line (or any other with pass -c <line_number> foo) and arbitrary metadata on the other lines. A typical entry would look like this:

passzzwoo00rrd11!!1!!
[email protected]
meta:bar
more meta=baz
otherstuff

where the second line could be the login name. However, everything except the password line is ignored by pass -c. It can only be displayed with another pass foo and copied manually if needed. This extension additionally copies the second line (by default) to another X selection (PASSWORD_STORE_X_SELECTION_META).

Usage

$ pass cl foo

The default behavior is to copy the first line (password) to the Clipboard as usual (like pass -c foo, paste with CTRL-V or CTRL-Shift-V). Additionally, the second line is copied into the Primary selection (Shift-Insert or middle mouse button to paste). We can use the xclip tool to check what we copied into which selection.

$ xclip -o -sel clip
passzzwoo00rrd11!!1!!
$ xclip -o -sel prim
[email protected]

The typical workflow is thus pass cl foo, go to where credentials need to be inserted (e.g. the browser), middle mouse -> login, CTRL-V -> password.

Select a metadata line

If you want to copy metadata from another line than the second, you can use -l <line_number>.

$ pass cl -l5 foo
$ xclip -o -sel prim
otherstuff

Alternatively, you can use the -r option to provide a regex matching that line.

$ pass cl -r meta: foo
$ xclip -o -sel prim
bar

The matching part of the line is removed, leaving only the metadata. This is useful for selecting lines by prefix (such as meta:). Hint: avoid whitespaces in your metadata lines (meta:bar instead of meta : bar) to keep the regex simple. In the last example we would need -r 'meta\s+:\s+' to match all whitespaces since we want the complete match to be removed, leaving only bar without any whitespace.

Swap selection content

pass show copies the password to Clipboard. If you need to paste this in a weird shell where not even CTRL-Shift-V works, then you can copy it to Primary instead with plain pass like so:

$ PASSWORD_STORE_X_SELECTION=primary pass -c foo

and paste that in the shell or anywhere else with Shift-Insert or the middle mouse button. With pass cl, you can use the -s flag to swap the content of Primary and Clipboard to have the password in Primary.

$ pass cl -s foo

Check:

$ xclip -o -sel clip
[email protected]
$ xclip -o -sel prim
passzzwoo00rrd11!!1!!
$ <Shift-Insert>
passzzwoo00rrd11!!1!!

pass compatibility

Make sure to place this extension's options right after cl

$ pass cl [options] foo

else pass's command line parser will complain.

We do not support any options of pass show such as -c|--clip [<line_number>] or -q|--qrcode [<line_number>]. For instance these won't work

$ pass cl -c [<line_number>] foo    # error
$ pass cl foo -c [<line_number>]    # ignored

If you want to use those, please use pass show directly and deal with metadata in another way. Here, the password is always copied from the first line.

Installation

$ export PASSWORD_STORE_ENABLE_EXTENSIONS=true
$ export PASSWORD_STORE_EXTENSIONS_DIR=$HOME/.pass_extensions
$ mkdir -p $PASSWORD_STORE_EXTENSIONS_DIR
$ ln -s $(pwd)/cl.bash $PASSWORD_STORE_EXTENSIONS_DIR/cl.bash

X selections

There are different X selections (see xclip -selection). If you never heard of those, then you are probably familiar with at least "the clipboard", CTRL-C to copy, CTRL-V to paste. Well, in X, we have 3.

• primary: default in xclip, what gets filled when you highlight stuff with the mouse cursor
• secondary: usually not used
• clipboard: the system clipboard you know from other systems

See also xclip-dump.