PINENTRY-QT(1)

💅 PINENTRY-QT — the pinentry-qt(1) manual, but make it make sense

okay bestie, welcome to the General Commands Manual for pinentry-qt. yes that's the manual name, yes I'm telling you up front, and yes we're gonna get through this together. grab a strawberry 🍓

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✨ NAME ✨

pinentry-qt — PIN or pass-phrase entry dialog for GnuPG

like. that's the whole vibe. it pops up a lil box so you can type your secret stuff in. iconic behavior honestly 👑

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

pinentry-qt [OPTION...]

that's it. that's the whole summoning ritual. options only, no positional args, no drama 💅

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so. pinentry-qt is a program that lets you securely enter PINs or pass phrases. and when I say securely I mean it tries to make sure the stuff you type doesn't get swapped to disk or temporarily stored anywhere. no cap. it's out here protecting your secrets like a bodyguard with main character energy 🫶

this is particularly useful for entering pass phrases when you're using encryption software like GnuPG, or email clients that use the same thing. and because it uses an open protocol, it's not tied down to any particular software — it's free to slay wherever it's needed. periodt.

pinentry-qt implements a PIN entry dialog using the Qt tool kit, so it's especially suitable for users of KDE. and if the X Window System is not active? no worries bestie, an alternative text-mode dialog will be used instead. there are other flavors out there that implement PIN entry dialogs using other tool kits, but this one is giving Qt. 🦋

also like… pinentry-qt is typically used internally by gpg-agent. users don't normally have a reason to call it directly. so if you're here reading this, you're either a maintainer, a debugger, or just nosy. all valid 💖

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💖 OPTIONS 💖

okay here's the whole menu, no skipping, no summarizing, we eat every single one of these 🍽️

• --version — prints the program version and licensing information. the receipts, basically. 🧾
• --help — prints a usage message summarizing the most useful command-line options. your lil cheat sheet bestie.
• --debug, -d — turns on some debugging. mostly useful for the maintainers. but heads up: this may reveal sensitive information like the entered pass phrase. so like… be careful, that's your secrets on display 😭
• --enhanced, -e — asks for timeouts and insurance, too. note that this is currently not fully supported. it's giving "in progress" ✨
• --no-global-grab, -g — grabs the keyboard only when the window is focused. use this option if you're debugging software using pinentry-qt; otherwise you may not be able to access your X session anymore (unless you have other means to connect to the machine to kill pinentry-qt). fr fr this one is a real trap, do not ignore it 💀
• --parent-wid N — uses window ID N as the parent window for positioning the window. note that this is not fully supported by all flavors of pinentry. 🪟
• --display STRING, --ttyname STRING, --ttytype STRING, --lc-ctype STRING, --lc-messages STRING — these options are used to pass localization information to pinentry-qt. they're required because pinentry-qt is usually called by some background process which does not have any information on the locale and terminal to use. Assuan protocol options are an alternative way to pass this information. 🌈

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🧚 SEE ALSO 🧚

the whole friend group, in order:

• pinentry-curses(1)
• pinentry-gnome3(1)
• pinentry-fltk(1)
• pinentry-gtk-2(1)
• pinentry-tty(1)
• gpg(1)
• gpg-agent(1)

the full documentation for pinentry-qt is maintained as a Texinfo manual. if the pinentry-doc package is installed, this command:

info pinentry

should give you access to the complete manual. go get the full lore bestie 📚

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

this manual page was written by Peter Eisentraut for the Debian project. thank you for your service king 🫡

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and that's a wrap, babe. this lil beauty is dated 27 Jan 2005, lives under the PINENTRY-QT(1) banner in the General Commands Manual, and that's the whole page. stay secure, stay slay, and never --debug your pass phrase in public 💅✨🌸