While 1Password is fantastic, their CLI is the worst CLI I’ve ever seen. Basically unusable.

You should just be able to say “give me the password for yahoo.com” but you can’t actually do that.

I wanted to use it to get npm 2FA on the command line and just gave up completely.

EDIT: if someone from 1Password reads this, please reach out. I have good CLI UX experience and would love to help fix it.

Disclosure: I am the lead developer for the team that builds the 1Password CLI.

You're completely right about the use-case there. One of the things I think we missed the mark on was choosing to expose the full item JSON structure as the default. I think it is important that access to the full item is available, but I think it would have been a much better user experience if we had abstracted that in the default case.

What you've pointed out here is what we are currently working on addressing. Development of the CLI was put on hold for over a year while development of our SCIM bridge was ongoing (they're built on the same codebase). In the past few months, we have ramped up the entire team, and movement has accelerated greatly on the CLI. This is feedback we're well aware of, and we're working hard to address it.

Feel free to post in our discussion forums if you're still willing to have a more extensive conversation: https://discussions.agilebits.com.

Really happy to hear you are working on it. FWIW your products are so fantastic I'm definitely more critical than I would be if that wasn't the case. I hold 1Password to a super high standard.

I'll give it a spin again too as it's been a while since I tried it last and check out the forums!

Thanks very much, and I hope within the next 2-3 months we'll be in a place where you can hold the CLI to those standards as well :)

Wow you handled that awkwardly critical comment like a champ! Haha. Cheers.

I think it's a consequence of their internal data type not being specific to passwords. You can store some semi-freeform data structures in 1Password's database (e.g. notes, documents, account numbers, security questions, even binary files).

You can totally design a CLI around that kind of data model without resorting to jq

Super disappointing to hear :/

On the plus side, they did get a bunch of funding recently so hopefully they'll be able to devote some resources to it. They definitely seem like an organization that is pretty devoted to quality products.