I was testing the German (de) keyboard layout, and thought that I had gone back to US layout, which is my actual keyboard. At next bootup, my password was wrong, and I couldn't figure out why. Then of course, the penny dropped, was still on the German keyboard layout. Which lead to the thought, it would be good to be able to toggle the display of the password to show the actual password, not star characters. So have implemented it. The 'init' script in the initrd has this: SHOWpw=0 #20251028 ...
