You’ve likely heard that the Rust-based version of sudo shows password feedback by default in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, upending nearly 40 years of learned (and confusing) behaviour.

Broadly, that decision has been well received, but those who want a quick option to temporarily mask their sudo input (no asterisks), just got one.

In the latest update to sudo-rs in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, you can toggle sudo password feedback visibility by pressing the tab key.

You can press that at any point during password entry (before you start or mid-way through, it doesn’t matter). Once you do, rather than asterisks appearing, a (no-echo) mask is shown, obscuring input.

Here’s a video of showing the differences between the two approaches in action:

Default (visible) behaviour first, then no-echo as I press TAB

The lack of visible feedback during sudo password input was a recurring point of confusion (some might say a rite of passage) for Linux newbies, who’d assume they did something wrong – or their Bluetooth keyboard connection had dropped out.

Sudo used silent feedback as an intentional security feature, since showing asterisks for your password reveals its length to anyone who might be gawping over your shoulder. If they know you well enough, they might recall you saying password1 was your nickname at school…

While sudo-rs opts to show feedback by default, it is still possible to enable the old, invisible behaviour through a simple sudoers file edit.

But the addition of a keyboard shortcut, added in a patch to the latest upload of sudo-rs in 26.04, offers an in-between approach: visible by default, hidden on demand.

Ubuntu’s switch to sudo-rs doesn’t change the command: you still run sudo.

When sudo prompts for your system password, you can type and see asterisks, or press your tab key to temporarily enter ‘no echo’ mode, and thus thwart any tech-minded miscreants indulging in a spot of shoulder-snooping as you work.

This flexible ‘no echo’ mode was pitched as an ‘escape hatch’ for security-conscious, and the ensuing code patch ensures that sudo-rs won’t interpret a tab key press as a character input during password entry itself.

All changes to sudo behaviour mentioned here do not affect Ubuntu 25.10, which was the first version to ship a Rust-based version of sudo.

The new behaviour is available to use in latest version of sudo-rs, uploaded to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS this week. If you installed the recent beta release (or an earlier snapshot or daily build), then keep an eye out for it in the Software Updater or apt.