That's true, the simple & fast UI (TUI/GUI) helps a lot. However, I would not extrapolate it to a huge problem. I am person, who have written own pass/passage implementation [0], just because I disliked how many steps I need to make to select the password for the form input, modify it or sync secrets.
Initially, I had used the `gopass`. It is probably the most convenient way to start using the password-store. It is cross-platform, 100% compatible with pass & pass-otp. To copy the password, you basically type the part of the file you are looking for. If you type "gopass show github", it will display a TUI, where you can select the file you are looking for (let's say you have two files "personal/github.com.gpg" and "work/github.com.gpg"). Unfortunately, the search function was far from perfect, and it had a problem with typos like "gtihbu"
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at the time, when I was using it.
To get rid of this issue, I decided to adapt pass/gopass to use `fzf` [2]. In the same time, my .password-store/ dir was rapidly growing that made me think about implementing pass from scratch. I improved the implementation to have better caching, synchronization between machines/mobile, but more importantly - a simple `secret [arg]` command that will execute `fzf` to list all known creds and simplify selection of the password. Of course, it accepted an argument that was limiting the results, which is great when you need to get back to the previous credential to retype something.
The introduction of `fzf` made it really convenient, and I decided to add more commands with fuzzy search, such as:
- `otp` - limits results files containing TOTP/HOTP token, calculates and copies it to the clipboard.
- `secret-edit`, `secret-remove`, `secret-show`... aliases to sub-commands that open `fzf` command in multi-selection mode, so by utilizing space key I could select what files are meant to be modified, removed, displayed etc. Quite handy for mass-edit.
- `secret-qr` - similar to the gopass' feature, but it made a simplified way to create and display QR codes dedicated to share contacts, WiFI SSID+password combination (etc.) to someone who was asking for creds from me.
Awesome, but alt-tabbing to the terminal got me annoyed after a few years of using it that way. I started pursuing for more sophisticated interface. I decided to give `rofi` [3] a try. I managed to fork that repo and also adapt to my convention of using password-store, but I left i3 for a macOS.
Currently, I have started working on a browser extension that takes care of suggesting password-store creds (based on the path, input parameters, location on the website etc.) similarly to what uBlock Origin does. That configuration is passed to my pass implementation, so on the github.com, my browser have only "work" and "personal" auto-suggestion, when I am focusing the text input.
I plan to create a similar app to Shortcat [4], but it will preserve the information what credential has been asked for the focused app. I think, with VoiceOver assistance, it is more than possible to mitigate the need for alt-tabbing to the terminal for electron/native apps.
[0]: It is a private repository, maybe when it will be polished enough I will open-source it.
[1]: https://github.com/gopasspw/gopass
[2]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
[3]: https://github.com/alecdwm/pass-rofi-gui
[4]: https://shortcat.app/
Edit: About the AWS login form. I strongly recommend giving `aws-vault` (https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault) a try. It helps you skip the login form with a simple command e.g.: "aws-vault login acme-corp --duration 2h". I find it better than `aws-mfa` on my dev machine.