Passphrase input not working on Android (Termux)

[BiswajitThakur]

Environment

• OS: Android
• rage version: rage 0.11.1

What were you trying to do

I was want to encrypt my file on Android OS (Termux app).

What happened

When I run rage -e -p -o hello.txt.age hello.txt command to encrypt file. It shows a TUI interface to enter passphrase and confirm passphrase but the problem is it don't accept password from keyboard.
Termux app provides tab, arrow keys. In TUI interface, all keys are working, i can switch between Passphrase and confirm passphrase, i can select Ok and Cancel button if the passphrase is empty. Once i entered passphrase, it stopped working.

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Type passphrase (leave empty to autogenerate a secure one)      │
│                                                                 │
│                                                                 │
│                                                                 │
│ Passphrase ____________________________________________________ │
│                                                                 │
│ Confirm passphrase ____________________________________________ │
│ ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │                                                             │ │
│ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
│         <OK>                                     <Cancel>       │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

[honza]

I have the same problem on Linux using Ghostty. Is there a way to force a certain pinentry program?

[honza]

rage will listen to PINENTRY_PROGRAM, this fixes it for me

[alecStewart1]

Wanted to confirm this is an issue for me, too on macOS with Nushell and Ghostty.
@honza what did you set PINENTRY_PROGRAM to?

EDIT: For me, I used pinentry-tty and that worked great.

[str4d]

Per the readme:

The PINENTRY_PROGRAM environment variable can be used to set the binary name or path to use. If a pinentry binary is not available, or PINENTRY_PROGRAM is set to the empty string, rage will fall back to the CLI instead.

The problem you are encountering sounds like a problem with the terminal app (Termux, Ghostty, etc.) not handling TTY interactions correctly, or not liking the way my pinentry crate is opening the pinentry binary. That's not something I can fix within the bounds of the rage binary, beyond the PINENTRY_PROGRAM environment variable I already added.

Closing this issue as there is a documented workaround.