Ksshaskpass is not meant to be executed directly, it will be called by ssh-add it is not associated to a terminal. To add it to the KDE autostart sequence you could for example create an executable script with the following content in ~/.config/autostart-scripts/ /---------------- |#!/bin/sh |# specify ksshaskpass as the ssh askpass program |export SSH_ASKPASS=/usr/bin/ksshaskpass | |ssh-add \----------------