First of all, all due credits go to this post by Mark on Sourceforge, many thanks to this unsung hero of the web.
Seven years ago I made a smallish tutorial on KeePass, as my password database grew I started adding multiple groups and sub-groups and my most used passwords ended up being buried and requiring too many clicks.
Seven years later I decided it was time to have them readily available on when I open the database, but I didn’t want to lose my neatly organized passwords. Thanks to Mark today I will show you how to add a “Favourites” view to KeePass, using KP’s triggers.
Tagging favorites
To achieve this we obliviously need a way for KeePass to identify what we consider a favourite entry. KeePass has a neat tag feature, edit all the entries, under “Properties” tab there’s a “Tags” field where we can, duh, set tags. We need to write the word “Favourite” on each entry, hopefully favourites are only an handful.
Going to Find – Tag – Favourite will show every entry we tagged as such.
But we want to automate this and save clicks!
Triggers
Explained with my dumb mistranslated words, a Trigger is an “if something happens, the do that”. Like mansplaining what mansplaining is to a feminist, you are the triggering event, while the feminist skinning you alive is the executed action.
On KeePass toolbar, go to Tools – Triggers
We will see an empty list, for now. Click Add on the right.
Show favourites when you open a database
Let’s make a trigger that will show our favourites when we load a database. In the “properties” tab set a good name, in this case I wrote “Show Favourites on database load”.
We want this action to automatically run when we open a database, so go to “Events” tab and click “Add” to create a new event and select “Opened database file” as the actual event. Leave the filter empty to let this event trigger with any database.
Now ignore the “Conditions” tab and go straight for the “Actions” tab. We want to “Show entries by tag”, recalling all the database entries with the “Favourite” tag.
Now the next time we open a database our favs will be shown first.
But what if I navigate to some random group and then want to see my favourites again? It’s time consuming to close and reopen the database. Let’s make a button.
Show Favourites Button
Again, from the KeePass toolbar let’s go to Tools – Triggers to add a new one. Always use a meaningful name to remember what it’s supposed to do.
We don’t want to create this button on database load this time, to avoid triggering this multiple times with different database. We will simply create it on KeePass start.
Add to action “Add a custom toolbar button”, put a random number in ID but remember what we put there (I used 100), give it a good name like “Show Favourites” and we want give it a description too.
Now this button will do exactly nothing when clicked.
Let’s go back editing to our previous “Show Favourites on database load”, rename it to “Show Favourites” and go to “Event” tab to add a second event, select “Custom toolbar button clicked” and use the same ID we used before.
Now we have two events linked to the same trigger.
Restart KeePass to trigger the button creation event. Now when we load a database or click this button we will have all our favourites ready.
