Feature Request for Password Generator recipes

Hi @simonf00,

Thank you for taking the time to send us your feedback and request! I found your post in our Mac Beta forum, but it doesn't sound like this is specific to the beta version, so I've moved it to our regular Mac forum. I hope you don't mind!

The 'Characters' option in the password generator is ideal for creating passwords requiring capital letters and numbers, and which may need to be restricted to a certain number of characters. On the other hand, the 'Words' option in the password generator was designed for situations where you need a strong password that is easy to memorize and/or type manually, so it only uses lowercase letters as well as a separator between words. If we added the settings from 'Characters' to 'Words', there wouldn't be much of a difference between those options.

However, in the situation you described, I can definitely see how that would be helpful, so perhaps we'll consider something like that for a future version. For now, keep in mind that you can edit a password in the generator, so you can easily add capital letters and/or numbers to it. (You probably already know about that, and I know it's not the same as having a setting to do that for you automatically, but I wanted to mention it in case it helps.)

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts with us about that. If you need anything else, please don't hesitate to let us know. Cheers! :)

You're very welcome! And thank you for describing your use case and asking about this - knowing how our customers use 1Password helps us to improve it. We really appreciate your feedback!

We're here for you if you need anything else. Have a great weekend! :)

Hi All

Thanks for the feedback.

I'm not sure how we might, if ever, implement these types of options. It might have been a really logical improvement we would have made back in the 1Password 2 and 3 days, where a vast bulk of our users were technically savvy. But over the years, and especially since version 4, 1Password has seen a lot of users coming in that are simply not technical users and we've had to do our best to make 1Password as friendly and straight forward as we can while still providing advanced features and options for those that want more.

The password generator is something we have previously tried to simplify as much as humanly possible for this reason. The more options there are in the password generator the more confusing it is for new users to figure out how to set it up how they wish. And the more checkboxes and sliders and other UI elements we add the more 1Password starts to look like a cluttered mess. Keep in mind that this type of UI has to live both on Mac and iOS, as well as Android and Windows.

We've been toying with the idea of a single slider for complexity and as the slider goes from left to right the password gets more complex as it gets longer. At one point if you slide past the threshold it'll move from one type of password to another. We haven't really found a way to make this work well but it's simply an idea of how we've been trying to look at simplifying 1Password's password manager instead of complicating it further.

The more I think about it the more I feel like some sort of advanced command line password generator might be useful for those who really want to crank up their password generation game. This allows us to keep the UI fairly simple but then expose some other options for users who want something a little more. Any thoughts on that?

@haroldh

I haven't used Enpass, so I can't comment there. My day is simply too busy today to consider looking I'm afraid.

Those recipes I suspect are used rather infrequently so that's kind of a lot of work to create a recipe only to use it once. Most sites have different rules so you'd technically have to create a new recipe for each one.

What I do instead is generate a longer password than they specify. So if they say a length limit of 32 characters I generate 42 or something along those lines. I crank up the digits and symbol options and generate a 42 character long password. Once generated I remove any offending characters they don't like. Note that on Mac at least you can click in the generated password and remove characters, or add your own. It's an editable text field.

Worse can be that sites don't tell you what those forbidden characters are until you've generated a password so that's another problem entirely but one I suspect bites people just as often.

I can't say I like the idea of these recipes though. I feel like it's not a very good experience, not that our current solution is great either but I don't think trading one sub-par experience for another is an acceptable solution here. If we're going to change things it needs to be fundamentally better.

The Password Generator is something that everyone has an opinion on as well. Everyone wants their favorite feature implemented in it and unfortunately that's just a complicated bit of work and the more features we add there the more convoluted the generator gets and the more difficult the underlying code and potential for bugs and issues to arise.

In my theorized command line generator you'd be able to specify your rules pretty easily with the aid of scripts. The script would effectively contain the recipe as the command line tool would basically allow you to set an allowed characters list and a disallowed list along with length requirements and similar options. You'd just run a script with a particular recipe to generate a new one.

This would provide a great deal of control, and bonus points if we could somehow link it up so that a generated password would effectively be available in the app itself after generating. It would give power users the options they want without cluttering the interface for the novices. The more I think about it the more I like it personally but perhaps I'm just a weirdo :)

Hi @haroldh

Thanks for the screenshots... aside from some styling differences that looks like someone has simply been photocopying and moving things around. I guess as they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

I'll see if I can have a discussion with the rest of our security team sometime in the future about this. No clue if anything will come of it but I don't think we've had much in the way of discussion about this in awhile so maybe there's some grand ideas we haven't discussed yet.

Wish I had more details beyond that and I don't want you to think I'm dismissing your feedback but this is a rather big thing that will require coordination across platforms and all kinds of other stuff. It's a pretty massive thing to change since we try to keep parity on new features between all 4 platforms we support (5 if you count our web client for 1Password.com)

I was hoping that you would have baselined the software code for 1Password by now

It is a goal that we're working toward, and it is becoming more of a reality with 1Password memberships.

As a trivial coincidence I found this cartoon that illustrates the user's frustration in order to find the right password. It's in Dutch, but I think you will figure out what the user experience is here :-)

Ha! Indeed! :chuffed:

Ben

@heyfletch,

Thanks, we'll definitely take these thoughts into consideration as we work on the next iteration of the password generator.

Rudy

@alanhoyle,

Thanks for the feedback; we've got a number of ideas for the next iteration of the password generator at this point.

Rudy

Thanks for the feedback, @brettdog. Sorry to hear you had such difficulty getting an acceptable password generated. Glad to hear that Kyle's suggestion will be helpful until/unless we can improve this.

Ben