I'd be even happier if everyone adopted the old school Lotus 1-2-3 password behavior.

I was much too young to use it myself, but I saw other people log in and it was amazing.

The glyphs denoting hidden password characters changed on every keystroke to indicate you were typing. And IIRC, they were cool characters like Egyptian hieroglyphs too. (Presumably this wasn't some hash of your actual password - that would actually be dumb. I do think it indicated password length, which could give away info, but it's also useful for the user.)

Edit: this is not exactly as I remember, but it might be the same system: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/41247/changing-...

If that's how it was implemented, then that's not great.

You're thinking of Lotus Notes, a completely different product.

IIRC, originally it echoed one glyph per character typed, but later it definitely echoed 1 to 3 glyphs at random so it wouldn't leak your password length.

The password thing was pretty cool, but it's literally the only good thing about Lotus Notes, which was the most archaic and primitive piece of commercial GUI software I've ever used in 45 years of software experience. I last used it in 2003, and even then its UI was so archaic, it didn't adhere to behaviors (like keybindings, and other basic UI elements) that had been standard since the 80s.

Absolute garbage software.

Perhaps you'd enjoy something like the xsecurelock prompts? https://github.com/google/xsecurelock