[systemd-devel] crypto: to show stars or not to show them

[Lennart Poettering]

On Sun, 27.03.11 23:52, Jan Engelhardt (jengelh at medozas.de) wrote:

> 
> On Friday 2011-03-18 01:41, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, 18.03.11 00:18, Jan Engelhardt (jengelh at medozas.de) wrote:
> >
> >> Meanwhile, I have two new suggestions.
> >
> >I have one too (or actually Kay came up with it), and I think you are
> >going to like it:
> >
> >Start with showing input feedback as we currently do. If the user then
> >presses TAB the stars disappear, and instead we show "(no echo)" or
> >so. Then, the user can proceed with typing his password without
> >asterisks.
> >[...]
> 
> Incorporating Graham's suggestion to use BKSP instead:

Hmm?

Backspace? Why backspace? I am not sure I like the idea and neither does
Kay who I discussed this with earlier today. If people mistype their
passwords, they tend to backspace them away again, and start anew. I am
pretty sure if they do that they'd be quite surprised if the password is
hidden completely even when they try to retype it afterwards.

I think it would be a bad idea to overload an existing key with a well
defined meaning with a different meaning, based on where the cursor
is. To keep things simple we should pick a currently unused key, which
TAB is. TAB in most UIs is used to switch between different UI
elements. I think this translates relatively well to the different
display modes in this context.

I have commited your patch nonetheless, but then replaced Backspace by
TAB in a subsequent patch. Would be cool if you could check if the
version in git still does what you need.

Thanks for your patch!

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.