Keychain saves my life (and my passwords)!

Keychain is a fabulous application which comes as standard on every Mac. It is the program which stores all your passwords for you.

For me, it has proven to be a lifesaver time and time again. I have more passwords for more sites than I have hairs on my head (not that that’d be very difficult!). I have systems in place to try to help me remember passwords but I frequently find myself staring at the login screen of a website with no idea what password (or username) I chose for the site.

This is where Keychain comes into its own. Launch it from Applications -> Utilities, search for the website, click the Show Password tick box. You are prompted to enter your login ID for your Mac, on doing so successfully, your password appears - brilliant!

Keychain

5 Responses to “Keychain saves my life (and my passwords)!”


  1. 1 John

    Yes, I love Keychain, it is a life saver for passwords!

    Its funny when im in a net cafe without my mac, I can never remember the passwords, LOL!

  2. 2 Sheamus

    Yep!

  3. 3 John Ward

    Its easier to have a single password, and use a greasemonkey script based on Nic Wolff’s I hate passwords mechanism.

    The greasemonkey script modifies each password input on the webpage, that once clicked provides a dialog. You enter your master password and its hashed using the websites domain name.

    Simple, easy and highly recommended.

  4. 4 Adrian Smith

    I hope you don’t mind Tom but I couldn’t resist plugging an open source application called Universal Password Manager (http://www.17od.com/upm) that I wrote to help me manage my passwords. While I too use (used) the keychain on OS X it was no use to me when I moved to a Windows machine, either my home or work PC. UPM is a password manager that runs on both OS X and Windows (it’s written in Java) so it can be used everywhere. One of it’s main features (and the main reason I wrote it) is the ability to have your password database stored at a HTTP location that can be accessed from home and work.

  5. 5 Jaki

    Just came across your site and I’m a windows user. Sure wish it came with its own password manager. Do you know of any reliable ones for us non-mac people?

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