You might want to think about it even in those cases; not so much for security, but just to open up your options. It takes me never more than a minute or two t

You might want to think about it even in those cases; not so much for security, but just to open up your options. It takes me never more than a minute or two to do the one time setup for certificates in an new OS install, whether Mac or Linux (at least for personal dev machines). And once done, I'm free to use any ssh tools which use certs, which should be pretty much all of them, rather than those that cache username/password... or compared to the username/password entry time. I definitely end up saving time by reducing redundant entry and by being able to use the best tool for the job sans any other gating factor. Naturally, this is all preference and you're free to choose things differently than I would suggest... but did want to offer you some food for thought.