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Comment by zwayhowder | Hacker News Reader

From the article: > I’m aware of pass and tried it before I came to this setup, but I want to put more info than just a password string in my files, so that’s why pass doesn’t fit my need.

I keep a lot more than just the password string in my files. They are just plain text files after all. My largest secret was a full dump of my old Lastpass database as some imports failed due to naming issues.

This looks like an interesting exercise but I think the pass ecosystem provides a more robust tool for day to day use; though neither option are useful for my non-technical family members (IMHO).

(edited for clarity)

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The only thing that is required (if you want the clipboard integration to work correctly) is that the first line of the file is the password. You can have other info in the file. Many of mine have my "secret questions" and their random gibberish answers, for instance.

I use pass and store all sorts of stuff in there.

For instance, I have five years of tax returns saved in it. It's a simple, secure way to store them for easy retrieval later.

To store:

   $ cat tax_return.pdf | pass insert -m taxes/returns/2017

To view:

   EDITOR=/usr/bin/evince pass edit taxes/returns/2017

While this works, at a certain point it starts to make more sense to use something like Nextcloud.

Looked at the wikipedia page for that project briefly, seems like just a private file server type thing.

That seems like a different use case from what I am after, which is safely and redundantly storing secrets in plain sight. I don't put random things in my password store, I put passwords and other sensitive or easy to misplace files that I will likely want to find later.

I agree that you'd be better off storing most of your files on a file server. But that's a different thing, in my opinion.

Or just use plain old gpg and a git repo or backup service. Pass is good because it is roughly domain specific to passwords and secrets. I wouldn't exactly consider tax forms "secrets", but rather just private information. Adding everything private and the kitchen sink seems like a misuse, but if it works, it works!

Yeah, after reading that sentence I kind of just stopped reading the article. Pass' multi-line flag lets you save whatever text you want.

It's really handy because you can save a couple of things like API keys and what not but have the first line be your password so you can still use it seamlessly as a password manager with the copy to clipboard flag, but then access the extra lines of details on a need to know basis.

Yeh, I wonder if it's due to the fact that `pass generate` and `pass insert` commands, by default, create one-line files that gives this impression.

Well, this exact use case is mentioned on the pass website [0].

> One approach is to use the multi-line functionality of pass (--multiline or -m in insert), and store the password itself on the first line of the file, and the additional information on subsequent lines.

The Android Password Store app [1] also handles this format, interpreting the first line as the password and displaying the subsequent lines as additional information.

[0] https://www.passwordstore.org/

[1] https://github.com/android-password-store/Android-Password-S...

I use my own wrapper over pass, https://github.com/cipherboy/p, to use the remaining space as a JSON blob and pretty-print it with jq.

Blog post author here, yes you are correct, I falsely assumed that I can only insert and manipulate one liners in the file due to these commands being the first things I learned about how to use pass, so I just moved away quickly without looking deeper.

Pass will store arbitrary text, and various pass frontends (qtpass, and ansible's passwordstore lookup plugin) will also allow you to put in key-value fields, and query them.

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