Why does universal autofill not work everywhere?

I am not the OP.

However, I've been having trouble understanding and using universal autofill with terminal apps. I just tried autofill in iterm2 at a sudo prompt. It worked as expected.

I usually use a different terminal app. Either kitty or alacritty. Both of which are much better terminals for me personally. UA will not fill in either of those terminal programs using the command-\ key. Copy and paste works of course.

As I said in my other thread about this, I'm quite confused by this design decision to limit UA to only certain things. I think UA should be trying to help me in any place where I want to fill username, password, or both.

Please consider this a request to allow Universal Autofill to work everywhere, regardless of the application, state of application, or place in the application. Having 1password determine whether or not it will fill is confusing for the end user. When you press the hot key and nothing happens you wonder if you pressed the key. Or if your setup steps were correct. Or if 1password stopped working. Or if the program is buggy. No feedback, failing to do what it is supposed to do, and making its own decisions are all poor behaviors for the end user.

It would be wonderful if it simply filled everywhere. With the possible addition of two autofill modes: Fill username and password, or just fill password.

Thanks for reading,
Brian.

Hello @blgentry! 👋

Thank you for the question! I've merged your other comment into your original thread so that we can keep the conversation in one place. 🙂

Universal Autofill is very deliberate about where it will fill your login credentials. This is a decision made for security reasons. Just like 1Password in the browser won't fill your password into any field on website, Universal Autofill will only fill your password into a password field in an app that you've previously linked to that login or that 1Password already recognizes as being associated with that login.

In order to protect the safety of logins, since they provide access to privileged data, the team has worked hard to make sure that 1Password is never filling login credentials into the wrong app.

When I pull up quick access, find my record, navigate to autofill and press enter, shouldn't it fill my password? It's extremely confusing that it just does nothing if it does not recognize the application or context as being "valid for autofill".

If you press command-backslash to fill your credentials into the password field inside of an app, and that app isn't recognized by 1Password then you'll see Quick Access appear instead. You can use Quick Access to select the appropriate login and then choose Autofill to fill that login. 1Password will then ask if you're sure that you want to fill your login into the app and will remember the app for the future. Are there specific Mac apps, aside from the terminal apps that you mentioned, where this isn't happening?

I usually use a different terminal app. Either kitty or alacritty. Both of which are much better terminals for me personally. UA will not fill in either of those terminal programs using the command-\ key.

Currently filling your Mac login password when using a sudo command will only work in Terminal and iTerm2, that being said I've filed a feature request on your behalf with our product team.

I look forward to hearing from you.

-Dave

ref: PB-36983011

If you press command-backslash to fill your credentials into the password field inside of an app, and that app isn't recognized by 1Password then you'll see Quick Access appear instead. You can use Quick Access to select the appropriate login and then choose Autofill to fill that login.

With Kitty, quick access does not come up when pressing command-\ . In other apps, that does happen as you said. However, autofill does not work in any generic app. It doesn't work in a text editor, nor in Alacritty. This is confusing for the end user.

I don't buy that "this is for security". What is the security implication here? That I'm going to accidentally press the hot key and accidentally fill this in to a chat application or something? If I press the key, I want the action to actually occur. Particularly if I pressed the hot key and selected something, and chose and action to be performed. What sense does it make to allow all of that and then just do nothing when the action is selected? Silent failures are not user friendly.

Please don't get my tone wrong. I'm a HUGE 1password fan boy. I can't stop talking about it. I find 1pass to mostly be quite friendly, well designed, and easy to use. But this particular behavior really needs to be changed.

I'm probably an outlier here, as I use terminal apps a lot and I have quite a few passwords that I would like to fill inside of terminal apps. I'm mostly typing them now and occasionally using quick access, select, -c to copy and -v to paste. This is clunky as compared to a real autofill.

Thanks for reading,
Brian.

@blgentry

I can see how it would be useful to be able to manually choose to fill into all sorts of environments and apps and, while I can make any promises, I've filed a feature request on your behalf. I've also separately passed along your request regarding the other terminal apps.

Thank you for the feedback! Please let me know if there's anything else that I can help you with. 🙂

-Dave

ref: PB-37010811