Context

Last time I described how I use Pass, a unix password manager, to add a bit of convenience and security to my life. Like all things in life, I opted for the DIY version of a tool that is also commercially available. Why? Because life is suffering! (If you want to actually know why then go read the post, it won’t take long).

What are we doing here…?

Well I can’t speak for you, but I am trying to have my cake and eat it too. I want a system that

is highly (perhaps completely) configurable
has no unwanted bells and whistles
is rippin’ fast!
assumes I know what I’m doing and lets me do it myself

This is why I opt for solutions that often involve a bit more setup. Things that work out-of-the-box are nice at first, but often leave me wanting more, navigating through feature bloat, or insecure to a degree that I find unsettling.

Enter Rofi

Rofi is a wildly useful tool. I use it for launching applications, opening SSH sessions, and a whole lot more. You can style it and use it to streamline a lot of workflows. Let’s take a look at how it could help us here.

With Pass, my workflow might look something like this:

go to website somesite.com
enter username in appropriate field
open a terminal window
ponder what folder I saved that password in
open a terminal
type pass find somesite and hit the return key
ah… that’s where it is…
execute the full pass command to copy the password to my clipboard
enter my GPG password in the system dialog
close the terminal window
go back to the web browser and paste the password

There’s a better way!

Rofi is really good at selecting one thing from a list of many. Seems perfect for this! I’m only trying to streamline the use case for copying an existing password to the clipboard, so something like this project that I found is a bit overkill for my needs (but I dig that someone did that). The workflow should look as such:

go to website somesite.com
enter username in appropriate field
run a script that interacts with Rofi (using a system keybinding)
type somesite or just enough to filter and select the right option
press enter
enter my GPG password in the system dialog
go back to the web browser and paste the password

That’s a lot better! Let’s see how we can get Rofi to streamline this workflow.

The Script

Rofi has a dmenu option that helps us out tremendously for this use case. From the documentation:

-dmenu

Run  rofi  in dmenu mode. This allows for interactive scripts. In dmenu mode,
rofi reads from STDIN, and output to STDOUT. A simple example, displaying three
pre-defined options:

    echo -e "Option #1\nOption #2\nOption #3" | rofi -dmenu

Or get the options from a script:

    ~/my_script.sh | rofi -dmenu

Armed with that knowledge, we can begin writing a script. Let’s start by defining a function that will get the options from Pass:

function menu(){
    cd ~/.password-store
    find -iregex .*\.gpg | cut -c 3- | sed s/\.gpg\$//
}

This lists all the GPG files in our password store (that is, all the encrypted passwords) and prints them out in a nice format. The cut -c 3- removes the leading ./ in the file names. The sed command replaces any .gpg substring found at the end of the string with nothing.

Like the documentation says, we can Pass that right into Rofi with the -dmenu option.

choice="$( menu | rofi -dmenu -i -p 'pass:' -matching fuzzy)"

Let’s create a variable choice to hold what the user chooses. Let’s also use the -i flag for a case-insensitive search, the -p flag to specify a prompt, and -matching to make the search fuzzy (because fuzzy searches are great when you organize things deeply in subdirectories like I do).

After that, all we have to do is execute the user’s choice (if there is any) with Pass.

# user cancelled - bail with no-op
if [ -z $choice ]
then
    exit
fi

pass -c $choice

That’s it! The whole script looks like so:

#!/bin/bash

function menu(){
    cd ~/.password-store
    find -iregex .*\.gpg | cut -c 3- | sed s/\.gpg\$//
}

choice="$( menu | rofi -dmenu -i -p 'pass:' -matching fuzzy)"

# user cancelled - bail with no-op
if [ -z $choice ]
then
    exit
fi

pass -c $choice

Thanks For Reading!

If you have any questions or improvements please feel free to drop me a line. You can reach me by sending an email to blog [at] this domain.