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Comment by andystanton | Hacker News Reader

I meant powerful in terms of the features it offers - for example strong password generation, keyboard shortcut driven UI, browser extensions, fingerprint scanner integration, different storage engines, categories for secure non-password stuff like credit cards, OTP support, shared vaults (over third party storage providers) and even stuff like the icons for each service are useful.

1Password has so many useful features, but the push towards the subscription model feels like Agilebits might phase out all other storage engines eventually, regardless of what the official line is right now. At least maybe they'll branch into Linux support if the subscription model brings in more revenue.

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> Strong password generation

    pass generate accounts/news.ycombinator.com 32

> keyboard shortcut driven UI

`pass` is a CLI application. It has tab-autocompletion and everything. It doesn't get more efficient than that (tip: use `pass find` to search for entries).

> different storage engines

It's just OpenPGP encrypted plain text on disk, not sure what more you could want, but there is support for Tomb (https://www.dyne.org/software/tomb/) as well. Anything you expose to the filesystem works of course, including services like SFTP.

> shared vaults

Syncthing or git, and the use of multiple OpenPGP recipients. (See `.gpg-id` in the `pass` man-file.)

> categories for secure non-password stuff like credit cards,

It's plain multi-line text. The only convention is that the first line is intended for the password or secret data that clients would copy to the clipboard. You can store whatever text you want.

> OTP support

https://github.com/tadfisher/pass-otp#readme

And because it is open and just files it took me 30 minutes to hack up a Python+dmenu script. Combined with the speed of SSD an entire walk of the tree is <100ms.

The shell interface is good. Especially `pass search`. Simple but effective.

It has gotten quite popular as well (amongst technical folks anyway). It is basically just a giant shell script. You can almost sense the authors frustrating. FINE I will just write a password manager myself. This started a simple 30 line shell script. Then you get into hacking on it. The you figure FINE I will polish it and release it. :)

Dmenu with pass is bliss. Emacs keybindings to navigate results. Super simple.

It's just a file system with gpg encrypted files at the end of the day. I keep it organized. Store credit cards, etc.

Browser and fingerprint.... No.

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