tessen

tessen is a bash script that can autotype and copy data from password-store and gopass files. A wayland native dmenu is required to use tessen and the following dmenu backends are recognized

• fuzzel
• tofi
• bemenu
• yofi
• wofi
• rofi

As of version 2.2.0 of tessen, fuzzel is the default dmenu backend.

If you want to add another Wayland native dmenu not mentioned above, please see the CONTRIBUTING.md file for information about how to contribute to tessen.

tessen is written to work only on wayland wlroots compositors such as sway that support the virtual-keyboard-unstable-v1 protocol. If you'd rather use a fuzzy data selection program like fzf to copy your password-store data on both Xorg/X11 and Wayland, check out pass-tessen.

Why use tessen?

• tessen can autotype or copy (or do both at the same time!) your password store and gopass data including all of your key-value pair data

  From what I've observed, most scripts out there do not autotype and copy all of your key-value pair data. They also do not offer choices about autotyping or copying data with the same flexibility as tessen does.

  Although rofi-pass is a good alternative, it only works on Xorg/X11. tessen is made to work on Wayland.

• if you're using a web browser extension to access your passwords, you may wanna read an article by Tavis Ormandy on Password Managers

• tessen does not use any external programs unless absolutely necessary. This means that tessen doesn't need programs like sed, awk, tr, cut, find, sort, head, tail (although password-store needs them).

• the code is linted using shellcheck and formatted using shfmt. I've also tried to ensure that tessen doesn't leak any sensitive data. Please raise an issue or a pull request if you can make tessen more minimalistic or secure.

Installation

Dependencies

• bash

• at least one pass backend is needed - either password-store or gopass

• at least one Wayland native dmenu backend, preferably fuzzel, or tofi, bemenu, yofi, wofi, rofi

• at least one (or both if needed) action backend - wtype or wl-clipboard

• libnotify (optional, to send notifications about copied data and the timeout period after which the clipboard will be cleared)

• pass-otp (optional, to generate TOTP/HOTP when using pass)

• xdg-utils (optional, to open URLs in the default web browser)

• scdoc (optional, to build the man pages)

tessen is available in the following operating systems

Operating System
Arch Linux (AUR)
Alpine Linux
NixOS
GuixSD

Git Release

git clone https://git.sr.ht/~ayushnix/tessen
cd tessen
sudo make install

You can also do doas make install if you're using doas on Linux, which you probably should.

Stable Release

curl -LO https://git.sr.ht/~ayushnix/tessen/refs/download/v2.2.3/tessen-2.2.3.tar.gz
tar xvzf tessen-2.2.3.tar.gz
cd tessen-2.2.3/
sudo make install

or, you know, doas make install.

Optional Steps and Minimal Installation

There's an optional patch provided in the repository called explicit_path.patch which can be used to change the shebang from #!/usr/bin/env bash to #!/bin/bash. It also exports $PATH to

/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

to prevent execution of arbitrary binaries not owned by the root user. If you want to apply this patch, execute

make expatch

before executing sudo make install. This patch should make tessen work fine on almost all Linux distributions except perhaps NixOS and GuixSD.

If you don't want to install the man pages or the shell completion files, you can use

sudo make minimal

to install the tessen and its default configuration file and nothing else. The man pages can be installed if needed using sudo make man, the bash completion file can be installed using sudo make bashcomp, and the fish completion file can be installed using sudo make fishcomp. For more information, use make help.

Features

• autotype or copy (or both at the same time!) data, including all valid key-value pairs, in pass and gopass
• generate TOTP/HOTP
• open URLs
• use custom values for user, password, url, autotype keys
• use custom autotype operations
• use custom delay time for autotype

Please read the man page for more information.

Caveats

The reason why tessen offers flexibility between autotyping and copying data is because autotyping may not always work accurately. There can be several reasons for this.

One of the reasons when autotype doesn't work is when a web page doesn't follow the standard expectation of having a username and password text field one after the other and links are inserted between them. A good example is the login popup offered by Discourse. In such cases, autotyping can make a real mess. This is why tessen also provides an option to define custom autotype operations.

tessen uses wtype for autotyping and it seems to work fine on Firefox. You'll need at least version v0.4, or later, of wtype for autotyping to work on Chromium although I've experienced issues on some websites when autotyping on Chromium using wtype. I haven't tested any other web browsers.

It also seems like autotyping on Wayland is in somewhat of a mess right now. An issue tracker on the the wayland-protocols repository by Roman Gilg titled Input Method Hub presents an overview on the state of things. As of version 1.7 of sway, the input-method-unstable-v2.xml protocol and the virtual-keyboard-unstable-v1.xml protocol (which is what wtype implements) are supported. There's ydotool but it requires root access to access /dev/uinput, which makes it unattractive.

What does tessen mean?

Here you go.

Why did you choose this weird name?

Because obvious names like pass-fzf and pass-clip are already taken by other projects? Also, for some reason, the way how bemenu and fuzzel's UI instantly opens up and displays relevant information reminded me of Japanese hand fans. I guess I was thinking of some anime while coming up with this name.

Contributions

Please see the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

Features that WILL NOT be implemented

• Xorg/X11 support

  either use rofi-pass or fork this repository and implement it yourself

• using ydotool, because it needs root access

• adding, editing, or removing existing password store data

• cache for storing frequently used password store selection data

• importing passwords or exporting them