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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

So there's KeePass, KeePassX, and now KeePassXC? (And two different variants of KeePass that have nothing to do with each other.)

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm just curious if KeePassXC is yet another fork, or if it's from the same people who did KeePassX. KeePassX has an excellent security reputation, so it'd suck if an unrelated fork ruined that.

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There doesn't seem to be active development on KeePass/KeePassX, hence the KeePassXC fork.

The C in the fork title apparently stands for 'community'. It has a lot of support behind it.

KeePass (the original C# version) appears to actively developed. KeePassX (the C++ rewrite) appears to have slowed down. KeePassXC (the fork of the C++ rewrite) is the one under discussion here.

There are two different variants of KeePass: the Windows version, and a KeePassX precursor.

No active development? I'm using KeePass on Windows (and have been for years) and I've just had a new update pushed (2.36)... Am I missing something?

KeePass is actively maintained, keepassx is the non-mono port for unix and is not being developed actively. Keepasssxc is fork of keepassx.

I believe the idea is to merge XC back to X down the road. Not sure if that goal changed.

KeePass is the original, and also not very cross-platform. KeePassX has gone through several iterations and now represents a fairly stable and low-feature release of KeePass with cross-platform support. KeePassXC is where all the new and exciting features are being integrated into KeePassX while fixing latent bugs and cross-platform issues. Hope that makes sense.

Is there any thought to merging efforts with the original KeePass project? I know it's C# based but with .NET Core being an option now, maybe it doesn't require Mono and could be made cross-platform. Or maybe keep the C++ code and fold it back into the original project?

I just hate to have multiple projects spend resources on what is essentially the same thing. I think there are gains to be had by combining resources together.

The larger problem on cross-platform KeePass was never Mono directly (aside from the FUD), but rather the WinForms UI. One could blame Mono for not having a visually pleasing implementation of WinForms, although .NET core has nothing at all.

Refactoring out a core and building multiple UIs would be an interesting and large project.

It doesn't necessarily have to be multiple UIs (although that's probably better in the long term) but there are x-platform options like:

1) Eto.Forms (https://github.com/picoe/Eto) 2) Avalonia (https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia)

Previous discussion of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13468486

Keepass is actively developed but uses .Net so Linux requires mono. So KeepassX was created to use C++ so Mono is not required but the project is inactive.

So KeepassXC was created as a fork of KeepassX for the linux users who don't want an ugly MOno version of Keepass.

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