Pinentrymac

Pinentrymac, also known as pinentry-mac, is a pinentry frontend for macOS that provides a native GUI prompt for passphrases and other secrets used by GnuPG and related tools. It implements the standard pinentry protocol used by gpg-agent to securely collect user input without exposing it to the terminal or other processes.

Pinentry-mac runs as a separate process and communicates with the gpg-agent via the pinentry protocol; it presents a macOS-style dialog with masked input, a cancel control, and support for timeouts and cancellation signals from the agent. It integrates with macOS accessibility features and is designed to feel like part of the macOS environment. It does not store passphrases; the entered secrets are passed to gpg-agent and discarded after use.

Installation and configuration: It can be installed as part of the GnuPG suite for macOS or via package managers such as Homebrew or MacGPG Tools. To use it, set pinentry-program in gpg-agent.conf to the path of the pinentry-mac binary. After restarting gpg-agent, pinentry-mac will handle prompts for signatures, decryption, and other operations that require a passphrase.

Security and usage notes: As with other pinentry frontends, pinentry-mac is a component of the OpenPGP workflow and does not retain secrets. It is intended to provide a secure, native user interface for passphrase entry and related prompts within the GnuPG ecosystem.

See also: GnuPG, pinentry, gpg-agent, OpenPGP.