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1st Sep 2025
In the ongoing effort to extricate myself from Google's services, I've been paring down my usage of their apps on my (admittedly Android) phone. I'm now down to two Google apps I use regularly: Maps (for traffic data) and Authenticator (for TOTP [A] Time-based One Time Password codes).
Now, I spend most of my time in a terminal window on MacOS or connected to a Linux machine; it'd be nice if I could get TOTPs on the command-line, and it turns out there's a utility called oathtool that allows for TOTP generation on the CLI. However, that would mean switching my OTP provider, which usually involves:
Logging into each service that has an OTP registered in the app;
Disabling two-factor authentication (2FA);
Re-enabling 2FA and using the "manual entry" code as input to oathtool ;
; Doing it all again for the next website or service.
Fortunately, Google's Authenticator provides a way to migrate codes between instances of the app based on scanning QR codes, and we can use this to migrate them away from Google into a TOTP handler of our choosing. It's another four-step process:
Generating a QR code in Google Authenticator for the codes you want to export;
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