aerc e-mail client and pinentry-curses problem

M

mefizto

Greetings all,

I have a problem with entering password asked for by mail/aerc. I am using sysutils/password-store, which invokes security/pinentry-curses bringing a window to the terminal, in which mail/aerc runs, to type a passphrase into. However, the terminal locks and does not allow to type in the passphrase.

As best as I understand it, security/pinentry-curses locks the terminal because gpg-agent
does not know which TTY to use for input, causing the ncurses interface to freeze waiting for a detached terminal.

To solve the problem, it is suggested to set and export GPG_TTY in the /bin/sh. I have set and exported it in
.shrc, and confirmed that it does work echo $GPG_TTY returning /dev/pts/2, but it did not seem resolve the problem.

Any help would be appreciated.

Kindest regards,

M
 
Is pkg pinentry-curses installed? I remember with mutt to get gpg to work right I had to specify it in $HOME/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf. But this was around FreeBSD-12. and with neomutt and using gpg so I don't know if it's at all relevant.
 
Hi scottro,

thank you for your reply.

Yes, I had to install the security/pinentry-curses, and yes, I did specify it in the ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf. Based on the different blogs, it appears that I am the only (un)lucky person facing this problem. I wonder if it is due to more strict FreeBSD adherence to POSIX than Linux does, as I had to modify some of the suggestions as no direct equivalent was found.

In fact, I am still fighting with trying to use editors/vim for the e-mail compositor only, since it appears to have a spell-checker. However, regardless how I configure it, FreeBSD stubbornly falls back onto the system vi.

Kindest regards,

M
 
I don't know arec at all. With mutt or neomutt, you can configure that in muttrc. Just remember that vim is going to be /usr/local/bin. You might be able to get spellcheck in vi as well, I'm not sure. For the times I need spellcheck, I use vim.
 
Hi scottro,

thank you again.

There is a configuration setting for an editor in the aerc.conf . However, it seems to be overwritten by the vi editor set in the ~.profile. The issue is, that I do not want to set vim globally; just for the email client.

Kindest regards,

M
.
 
At this point, I'm just guessing, but what if you comment out ~.profile for vi. Set editor for vim in aerc.conf. My use case is probably different, but for me, I use email and vim, but mostly when I'm editing files I just type vi <filename> so I would think (in my case) it would ignore my profie. (I use bash so it would be my .bashrc, and I don't have an editor set there). And if I type visudo or vipwd it seems that I'm using vi, not vim. Not knowing your workflow, I don't know if such a thing would work for you or not.
 
Hi scottro,

thank you again.

The reasons for trying to use vim is (i) spellchecking and (ii) setting and correctly interpreting the color of quoted text in replied to messages.

Since running different editors for different application appears to be rather obscure problem, perhaps I should resign on the vi and use vim globally. My worry is that I will get use to it and become confused when ssh into machines without vim installed.

Kindest regards,

M
 
Your thoughts make sense to me. For what it's worth most versions of Linux seem to default to vim, RedHat for example. FreeBSD's default vim is still pretty basic. For example, many versions of Linux have their vim so customized that I usually find myself removing their default vimrc because I can't figure out how to navigate, vs. highlighting. Again, not knowing your workflow and not using aerc, I can only make guesses, but it seems as if using vi <filename> would enable you to use vim for aerc and vi for everything else.
 
Hi scottro,

I gave it one more try, but I still could not achieve my goal. So, it seems that the solution is to just enable vim/neovim globally and install it on all my FreeBSD computer.

Kindest regards,

M
 
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