Knock knock! Who’s there? … 1Password.

I’ve been using 1Password for almost a year now and I love it.

1Password Mini (that thing that lives in the OS X menu bar) is my favorite, especially combined with the Cmd+Alt+\ (or ⌘⌥\) shortcut key that opens the menu, focused on Search. Type a few letters, hit the right arrow, hit the down arrow, hit Enter and boom — you have your password in your clipboard for 90 seconds. Amazing!

However, a recent update to 1Password added a nice little animation to the item details screen that pops up in 1Password Mini. The animation lasts for less than a second, but during that fraction of a second you have to wait before you can hit the down arrow and select your password.

1Password Mini

So now it’s more like type, right arrow, wait a bit… down arrow and Enter. And if you didn’t wait enough, you’ll copy your username instead, and now you have to do it all over again. Argh!

I counted the number of times I copy passwords from 1Password Mini on a daily basis, that’s around 30! Rounding that extra delay up to one second means that this animation now costs me approximately three hours per year!

It’s the little things.

Update: Here’s what 1Password had to say on Twitter:

As I already mentioned in the comments, I’m not really worried about the browser — my copy/pasting almost always goes to the Terminal for things like SSH, Subversion, etc.

But it seems like #2 gives me my 3 hours/year back. Thank you 1Password, did I mention you rock? Well, you rock.

About the author

Konstantin Kovshenin

WordPress Core Contributor, ex-Automattician, public speaker and consultant, enjoying life in Moscow. I blog about tech, WordPress and DevOps.

11 comments

    • Thanks for your comment, haven’t tried LastPass, but from the description on their website it seems like they’re just browser extensions. Browsers is the least thing I’m worried about, my copy/pasting password-foo often happens in the command line when connecting to servers via SSH, committing code to private Subversion repositories, etc.

  • I am on windows mostly and am unaware about the mini, must be Maverics specific feature I guess but so far over a year 1password rocks (even on windows). Not sure how I would live without it if I have to abandon it. I love the iPhone app as well, though I don’t have the need to use it as much as the desktop app. Very well worth the price paid.

  • I just played with this a bit, and noticed a bug (besides the delay). If you hit down too quickly, as you mentioned, the username will be selected instead of the password. However, if you then notice that, and hit down again (once the animation is complete), the selection jumps past the password field, to whatever is after it! You then have to hit up to select the password field.

    It would appear that the down key press is getting registered somehow, but not applied until you hit down again, resulting in two downs in a row.

  • I’ve been using 1Password for the better part of 2 years now on all my iOS devices and Mac OS X. I have never actually used the shortcut feature, so thank you for that introduction.

    What version of 1Password are you using? I saw that there should be a release of 4.2.2 but I have not seen an update via AppStore for Mac OS X, as well there should be updates for iOS devices

  • Thanks for mentioning this (including the comment from Travis describing the issue which I was able to reproduce). We’re working on some improvements, but for now it may help to:

    1. use ⌘\ to fill Logins directly in the browser, or, if you are are not in a browser,
    2. use ⇧⌘C to copy the password of the item you have selected.

    Note that ⇧⌘C works in both the main 1Password app as well as mini from the menu bar (or more toward the middle of your screen if you have disabled “Show mini app icon in the menu bar” and use ⌥⌘\ to open it).

    I hope that helps. Thanks for your feedback on this!

    • That surely helps a lot. I don’t even care about the animation now since I don’t really have to see it :)

      Thanks for all your hard work Khad, and thanks a bunch for coming here to comment.

  • Glad I’m not the only one annoyed by that :)

    I’ve been middle-clicking* to get it to come up faster, but it’s still a worse UX than the previous version, which was worse than the one before that :|

    Still, even with those annoyances, I agree that 1Password is pretty awesome and something I recommend to everyone.

    * Actually, that doesn’t seem to be working anymore. Maybe it never did and I was just imagining it? Oh well. command-shift-C isn’t too bad.