I wrote pass, originally just as just a dumb bash script that I was using privately, but then I put it on the Internet, and so all of the sudden there was a requirement to _not be awful_. The experience has been pretty frustrating, for precisely the reasons pointed out by GP: the gpg command line interface is atrocious. I'm required to parse things in a million crazy ways, buffer data myself, and work around all sorts of weird behaviors. All of that headache, and then in the end all I get is lame PGP crypto out of it? As I said, frustrating.

On the flip-side, at least we've (partially?) succeeded in taming the beast, and the end result is something moderately usable that you happily recommend to folks on HN. So that's good I suppose. :)