UX: weird unknown gui pops up when using cli

[DianaNites]

What were you trying to do

Encrypt a file with a passphrase

What happened

instead of prompting for my passphrase in the terminal like I expected from a cli tool, it opened a GUI prompt.

Investigation shows this is related to something called pinentry, which has no way to be disabled except by making PATH empty? Which doesn't work, because.. then rage cant be found. Having to rewrite or construct a new PATH only pointing to rage, on the fly, or only use the absolute path, every time I want to use it, is just completely unacceptable.

pinentry apparently lives in /usr/bin and is a transitive dependency of gnupg, which itself is a transitive dependency of pacman, meaning it will always exist on Arch, and likely many other linux distros, and I as a user have no control over this.

More generally, rage is a command-line tool, and i do not expect such tools to open GUI windows unless explicitly told to, let alone ones from insecure legacy programs like gpg, and especially not when this behavior is documented nowhere, an open issue which has existed since 2021, #280.

This is not the behavior I expected at all

rage -p some_file -o some_file.age

[str4d]

rage 0.9.2 listens to a PINENTRY_PROGRAM environment variable, which can be set to the empty string in order to disable pinentry usage and force the CLI fallback.