password-gen

• Introduction
• Motivation
• Installation
  • Local Installation
  • Straight + use-package
  • Other Methods
• Upcoming Changes
• License

Introduction

password-gen is a utility package for generating passwords from within Emacs. These passwords can be either copied or directly inserted in an Emacs buffer.

Motivation

I often manipulate files that deal with passwords, such as dotenv files for services I either deploy to my servers or work on myself. I got really tired of always opening a terminal, remembering which command to use, copy manually its output only to insert it back in my initial Emacs buffer. So, why not directly generate it from Emacs and have it available as is?

Installation

Local Installation

The vanilla way of installing this package is to clone this repository somewhere on your machine and add it to your Emacs’ load-path as shown below.

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/path/to/your/clone/password-gen.el")

Then, you can require this package as needed.

(require 'password-gen)

Straight + use-package

This is my preferred method, as I use this combo everywhere in my configuration. This snippet below is what I use to have my package available.

(use-package password-gen
  :straight (password-gen :build t
                          :type git
                          :repo "https://labs.phundrak.com/phundrak/password-gen.el.git")
  :ensure t
  :defer t)

Other Methods

I am aware other methods are available, such as a use-package only method (especially interesting since Emacs 29), elpaca, quelpa, or Spacemacs’ and DoomEmacs’ package managers. However, I am unsure how to install it with these methods. If you do, feel free to submit a PR with new instructions!

Upcoming Changes

When working on this project, I was mainly inspired by Bitwarden’s password generator. Here are some features I would like to implement in the future:

• Avoid ambiguous characters (don’t generate O and 0 in the same password, for instance)
• Have a minimum amount of special characters
• Have a minimum amount of numbers

License

password-gen is available under the GNU GPL-3.0 License. You can find the full text in LICENSE.