pinentry-curses sucks

Being a happy GnuPG 2 user — GnuPG which still works despite a growing complexity, I had to approach pinentry, and while pinentry-gtk-2 works perfectly, the same cannot be said of pinentry-curses. First of all, it won’t allow me to input keycodes such as ^H correctly without the “no-grab” option, and secondly it breaks software using ncurses: when I try to invoke it from poezio, for instance. And let’s not forget that when it doesn’t know where to attach, it will eat up 100% of a core without asking.

Of course, it could be my fault, because I’m too stupid to configure this precious jewel, but after having spent more than ½ an hour trying to find a solution on the Web and on Usenet, it seems I’m not the only one, and that there’s no real solution. So, I have to use pinentry-gtk-2, which is a non-issue on a desktop machine running X.org, but could cause trouble on a headless server.

Fortunately, one can still emulate GnuPG 1’s behaviour, which I do with mutt so as to avoid tedious maneuvers.