#About

Passphrase is a small, simple passphrase generator.

#Background

I was using Bitwarden's passphrase generator, which is good, except it only uses English words, and is also very slow. So I made this one. It's pretty fast and you can use any wordlist, or standard input. An English wordlist is included, and is the default.

#Implementation

Passphrase uses a reservoir sampling algorithm, so memory usage is proportional to the requested number of words, rather than the size of the wordlist.

#Building

The program is written in Zig, so you will need the Zig compiler, which is called zig in most package managers. You can also download a static build if it's not packaged for you.

To build and install the program:

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe --prefix ~/.local

It installs an executable file in $PREFIX/bin, so that should be in your $PATH.

To run the tests:

zig build test

To build the manpage:

zig build doc

If you don't need full Unicode support, you can disable it, to save some space:

zig build -Dunicode=false

#Usage

Use passphrase -h to see the available options.

Use passphrase < path/to/one-word-per-line.txt or command-that-outputs-one-word-per-line | passphrase for a custom wordlist. A single word longer than 31 bytes will result in an error.

If the output is piped into another command, for example passphrase | wl-copy to put the passphrase in the clipboard, the ending newline is omitted, so that it can be safely pasted.