I’m documenting this because it is a bit obscure. My original source for these commands can be found here.

I prefer to just use pinentry-curses for unlocking GPG keys because it’s so simple and I’m really only using my GPG keys from the terminal. And the GPG agent on Mac will always ask to save the passwords in the keyring – which I don’t want.

Add the following ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf:

pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-curses

Or if you’re on MacOS using the Homebrew version:

pinentry-program /usr/local/bin/pinentry-curses

Then reload your GPG agent:

gpg-connect-agent reloadagent /bye