Passphrases

pass and gpg ask for your key’s passphrase through a pinentry, and GnuPG’s own want X or a terminal. A program run with neither (GemMail’s password command, say) then can’t ask, and fails until you’ve unlocked the key somewhere else. pinentry-gem asks in a GEM alert box instead, on Wayland.

Point GnuPG at it in ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf:

pinentry-program /usr/local/bin/pinentry-gem

then gpgconf --kill gpg-agent (it starts again when next needed). The first program to need the key gets the box; after that, the agent’s cache (default-cache-ttl, in the same file) answers. With no Wayland display, over SSH say, it hands over to pinentry-curses.