PIN entry for Debian -------------------- This package and its sibling packages are intended to be used as a pass-phrase entry dialog for the program gpg-agent (Debian package gnupg-agent). To configure gpg-agent to use one of the provided pinentry programs, put something like this into your ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf: pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-FLAVOR You have the following pinentry variants to choose from: /usr/bin/pinentry Generic name that points, via the Debian alternatives system, to the "best" installed PIN entry program. gpg-agent uses this by default. /usr/bin/pinentry-gnome Graphical PIN entry program that uses GNOME's gcr prompter. This package will work on systems that use Wayland as well as X11, and it is the preferred pinentry for desktop systems (package pinentry-gnome). /usr/bin/pinentry-x11 Generic name that points, via the Debian alternatives system, to the "best" installed PIN entry program with X11 support (that is, one of the GNOME, Qt, GTK+2, or FLTK flavors). /usr/bin/pinentry-qt Graphical PIN entry program that uses the Qt tool kit (package pinentry-qt). /usr/bin/pinentry-curses Text-mode PIN entry program that uses the curses tool kit (package pinentry-curses). /usr/bin/pinentry-tty Minimal Text-mode dumb-terminal PIN entry program (package pinentry-tty). /usr/bin/pinentry-gtk-2 Graphical PIN entry program that uses the GTK+ tool kit version 2 (package pinentry-gtk2). /usr/bin/pinentry-fltk Graphical PIN entry program that uses the Fast Light Toolkit (FLTK) (package pinentry-fltk). The graphical variants automatically fall back to the curses interface if no desktop environment is available. So for example, if you frequently switch between text mode and KDE, and you want to use both Mutt and KMail with GnuPG pass-phrase agent support, then configuring /usr/bin/pinentry-qt would work. (In this case, leaving your configuration alone would also work, if you only have pinentry-qt installed) Note that while pinentry-curses and pinentry-tty will work in some cases in a non-graphical environment, they are likely to fail when used while sharing a tty with a terminal-intensive program like emacs. If a graphical pinentry isn't possible, the recommended workaround is to have a pinentry-tty or pinentry-curses attached to a separate, dedicated pseudoterminal. (see https://dev.gnupg.org/T3217 for more details) -- Daniel Kahn Gillmor , Fri, 8 May 2020 12:11:12 -0400