Copying generated passwords not working properly

Ask the Community Password Manager
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1

So, back story: I am a LastPass refugee. I switched to Bitwarden back in August of last year, right around the time LastPass had one of their security breaches. Then I found out that they had another breach that exposed all their customers’ vaults.

Since the revelations, I’ve been changing the passwords on all accounts I have.

My method has been to generate a random password using Bitwarden’s password generator, which has been working fine, until now.

Since I restarted my PC this evening, whenever I highlight and copy the generated password, instead of getting the string that was generated, I get each character on a separate line, separated by two lines. Each character after the first has what appears to be a tab space before it.

Here’s an example: a 10-character password of “6udj%Ce5nW” ends up copying as:

6

u


d


j


%


C


e


5


n


W

Now I know I can use the “Copy password” button, but as a creature of habit, I copy the text, which was working fine until I rebooted. I assume there was a change Bitwarden made that was made which is causing this, as it happens in both Edge and Firefox.

Any insight as to what’s going on?

2

I had a hard time reproducing this issue, because you has tagged your post app:desktop, but then you mentioned that this was happening in Edge and Firefox, and you never specified which of the avaialble password generators you were using (i.e., the stand-alone online generator, the generator in the Web Vault, the generator in the Desktop app, the generator in one of the browser extensions, of the generator in one of the mobile apps).

After testing all of them, I found that this happens only in the Web Vault Generator in the Tools menu, and then only when highlighting the text to copy it using the browser’s Copy command (e.g., Ctrl+C).

Unfortunately, you are going to change your habit, one way or another. Using the Copy password button is the obvious way, but that’s not even the best method.

If you like working in the Web Vault, why don’t you open the actual vault item for the login account that you are updating? There is an integrated password generation tool right there — you can create a new password by clicking the :arrows_counterclockwise: icon just above the password field to generate a new password. If you toggle the visibility (click :eye: icon either before or after generating the password), then you can even use your old method of highlighting the password text to copy it (of course, the better way is to click the copy button — the icon that looks like two overlapping squares — in which case you don’t even need to toggle the visibility). And the best part, you can now click the “Save” button and your vault record will already have the updated password (or click “Cancel” to discard the newly generated password and retain the previous password).

There are other workflows which are even better (for updating passwords), but since you are apparently a creature of habit, I will suggest that you start by trying out the method described above. If you don’t like it, then you can try using the stand-alone password generator instead of the one that is available in the Tools menu of the Web Vault. With the stand-alone generator, you should be able to follow a procedure that is practically identical to what you have been doing.

P.S. I changed the tag for this topic from #app:desktop to #app:web-vault .