GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 743763
The system modal design of password prompts prevents copy/paste
Last modified: 2015-06-30 07:52:05 UTC
There is a major annoyance when prompting passwords using system modal dialogs: Usually, if I don't remember a password, or if the password is too long to be entered manually, I usually copy the password from another application (for example a custom password manager, or an email), and paste it to the password prompt. When using Gnome, the password prompt is system modal, which means that task switching is prevented until the password is entered, but I cannot enter the password because it is located in another application, that cannot be selected until the password is entered. As a solution, I propose to make the dialog application modal, that is preventing user input only the application that requests the password in the keyring, and freely allowing task switching, and normal operation on the rest of the system.
Came here to report the same. I use keepass2 for password management, and this is keeping me from looking up my passwords.
This is a general problem with GNOME shell. The various system prompts, regardless of whether they involve gnome-keyring or not are all system modal. This includes network-manager prompting for passwords, or VPN keys, and so on. I would like the GNOME designers to weigh on this issue and make the call here, rather than having a bunch of bandaids for it.
Thanks for taking the time to report this. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 688434 ***