I got tired of pinentry popping up and interrupting whatever I was doing; I didn’t find a solution elsewhere, so I wrote a little bash script to address this. This is designed for (poly|i3|way|…)bar users. The blog entry (no ads, no tracking) linked has the script verbatim, plus some rambling about the why and wherefore.
It’s 22 lines of does-stuff; the rest is whitespace, comments, and instructions – including a little blob example of using it with polybar.
A known issue is that it does occasionally pop up pinentry twice in a row when unlocking. I’m not surprised, and it has happened to me only once since I’ve been using it – not enough for me to need to bother trying to address it. But I wanted to call it out.
It’s not rocket science, but it took a bit of time to make sure it functioned correctly (enough), and hopefully it’ll help someone else.
Maybe I don’t understand the problem but the only time that pinentry pops up for me is when I am signing something. What sort of situations does it just randomly pop up or what sort of specific apps/configuration would that happen at random?
I replied to the wrong comment, so my answer is here. Sorry, eh
One time this happens to me is with
duplicity
. There’s always some delay between starting a backup and being asked for the key. It’s probably something that should be improved in duplicity itself though…Sorry, I replied to the wrong comment somehow.
That’s why I don’t bother signing backups, only encrypt them
I have some timed services using gopass to get credentials for, among other things, mbsync and vdirsyncer. These run on a user cron job, and they need a password to decrypt the credentials. The credentials are cached, but the cache is cleared every couple of hours, and if the screen locks.