Commodity and Tooltypes

Commodity and Tooltypes

AmiAuthGUI is a proper AmigaOS Commodity: it runs resident in the background, appears in Exchange, pops up on a hotkey, and is single-instance. This is the recommended way to run it — you unlock the vault once, and it stays available all session, to both the hotkey and the Shell CLI.

Behaviour as a commodity

• Hotkey (default Ctrl-Alt-A): if the window is hidden, it opens; if it's already open, it comes to the front and activates.
• Closing the window hides it — the process stays resident and the vault stays unlocked. Bring it back with the hotkey, Exchange's Show, or AmiAuth SHOW from a Shell.
• Quitting for real is Project → Quit (or Exchange's Kill, or removing it in Exchange). Key material is zeroed on the way out.
• Single instance: launching AmiAuthGUI a second time doesn't start a second copy or re-prompt for the passphrase — it just tells the running instance to show its window.
• Exchange lists it as "AmiAuth" ("TOTP/HOTP authenticator") and all the standard messages work: Show / Hide / Enable / Disable (the hotkey) / Kill.
• CLI forwarding: while resident, the Shell AmiAuth command sends GET, LIST, ADD, REMOVE and SHOW to the running GUI instead of opening the vault itself — no second passphrase prompt. See CLI Reference.

Without commodities.library (a bare OS install), AmiAuthGUI degrades to a plain application window: no hotkey or Exchange entry, and closing the window quits.

Tooltypes

Set these in the icon's Information window (Workbench: select the icon, then Icons → Information). The CX_ tooltypes are the standard commodity set.

Tooltype	Default	Meaning
CX_POPKEY	ctrl alt a	The hotkey that shows/raises the window. Standard commodities hotkey syntax: qualifiers (ctrl, alt, shift, lcommand, …) followed by a key, e.g. CX_POPKEY=lcommand a.
CX_POPUP	yes	no = start hidden: the commodity loads silently and the window first opens on the hotkey (or Exchange Show). The right choice for WBStartup.
CX_PRIORITY	0	Commodity broker priority — the order commodities see input. Rarely needs changing.
DONOTWAIT	—	Not read by AmiAuth itself: tells Workbench not to wait for the program to exit. Set it on any WBStartup icon.

The CX_* names also work as Shell arguments when starting the GUI from a script (Run >NIL: AmiAuthGUI CX_POPUP=no).

There is no VAULT tooltype: the GUI finds its vault via the AMIAUTH_VAULT environment variable, the path saved in ENVARC:AmiAuth/vault at first run, or the PROGDIR:AmiAuth.vault default — see Vault and Passphrases.

A WBStartup icon that works

As explained in Installation: leave AmiAuthGUI in its own drawer and put a project icon (or a Run line in S:User-Startup) into WBStartup rather than copying the executable there — PROGDIR: follows the launch directory, and AmiAuth's vault lives in PROGDIR: by default. (The absolute vault path recorded in prefs at first run protects you even if you do copy it, but the project-icon shape is the clean one.)

Suggested tooltypes for that icon:

CX_POPKEY=ctrl alt a
CX_POPUP=no
DONOTWAIT

Result: nothing visible at boot; press Ctrl-Alt-A anywhere, enter your passphrase once, and from then on the hotkey summons your codes instantly.

Choosing a hotkey

ctrl alt a is chosen to be unlikely to clash. If it does clash (some terminal programs and other commodities grab similar combinations), pick another with CX_POPKEY — Exchange will show AmiAuth's current hotkey in its information view. If two commodities claim the same hotkey, the one with the higher CX_PRIORITY gets it.