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Bluetui – A TUI for managing Bluetooth on Linux
- gbin 1y agoYet another impressive rust/ratatui tool! I am really a fan of those projects (kudos to Orhun). At Copper Robotics we use it for our monitoring console, it is so easy to just ssh on a robot and get all your monitoring state in super snappy TUI screens instead of web stuff.
- pythops 1y agobluetui author here, Thanks, glad you like it. And yes Big kudos to Orhun !
- hombre_fatal 1y agoMuch better than bluetuith which has weirdly bad UI/keybindings.
- rjzzleep 1y agoI don't usually comment on these things. But this is phenomenal. I really like that the person that did this thought about a simple space for connect and enter for disconnect. I use rofi based tool whenever I don't feel like using my mouse and frequently disconnect because I toggled something that was already connecting. The same happens when connecting or disconnecting from VPN using the nm applet. This is a simple but extremely useful way of separating two states.
- pythops 1y agoBluetui author here Happy to hear that :)
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoHave you considered a network manager? Weirdly enough I have no trouble connecting to a Bluetooth device via bluetoothctl, I can never remember how to disable wifi, or set a static ip though
- frumiousirc 1y ago> Have you considered a network manager? I've used "nmtui" on Linux for many years to do this. "nm" = "Network Manager".
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoThanks, this sounds like what I need ;)
- bfkwlfkjf 1y agoSeconded nmtui. The bluetui author also has impala, which is a tui for the network manager. But in this case, nmtui is good enough.
- pythops 1y agothat's why I don't like network manager and bloated software in general, they try to do everything and it always come problems You don't need network manager for bluetooth. just install bluetoothd and there you go and use bluetui or bluetoothctl for wifi, I recommend iwd, and then you can use impala, or iwctl pick up the right tool for right purpose
- userbinator 1y agoWhy not show the device address? There's plenty of room for it and it's important when you have multiple devices with the same name. Or has the abominable trend of excess whitespace infected TUIs too?
- dymk 1y agoThere's probably nicer ways to express that criticism
- userbinator 1y agoI've absolutely had it with shit "designer" UIs hiding useful information and leaving a sea of useless space instead. There's nothing "nicer" about making users go through more effort.
- lysp 1y agoThat has nothing to do with this author and everything to do with you.
- userbinator 1y agoZero attempt to answer my original question. Looks like I've stepped into another pit of toxic positivity here.
- anthk 1y agoIt's a plague under TUI go software too made with Bubbletea. Also, with some mesh related interfaces written in Python. Both slow and with a shitty interface not properly working under an 80x24 terminal with 16 colours. I remember some hipster fauxretro player with just some playlist made of m3u links, written in Go. The visualization animations made it unusable under my n270 CPU based netbook. Meanwhile, the playlist URL's from the code played perfectly well under mocp with a really low CPU usage. Oh, you want bells and whistles? I think the Cava terminal visualizer can work with MPD and plug any CLI/TUI client you like.
- _f9cu 1y agodoes TUI stand for terminal user interface ?
- caymanjim 1y agoYes. The term has been around for at least a few decades, but only became somewhat more widely used in the past decade. Only really known by people who spend a lot of time on the command line.
- EgregiousCube 1y agoNot to be confused with CLI, which is literally for people who spend a lot of time on the Command Line :)
- unwind 1y agoMy understanding is T for text-based [1], the term is used about e.g. DOS programs too where the text interface is not historically called a terminal. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface
- kachapopopow 1y agoI wonder why omarchy isn't using this yet.
- kachapopopow 1y agoI found out: it used to be a lot less intuitive
- SwiftyBug 1y agoSame. First thing I did was replace the action of the bluetooth icon in Waybar with bluetui.
- udev4096 1y agoomarchy is a shitshow. Please stay away from it. It's a disaster waiting to happen. It's the most bloated install script I have ever seen. DHH is fucking liar and taking up all the credit for himself by ripping off of bunch of well established open source projects
- moondev 1y agoI can't remember where I heard it, but somebody said all Linux distributions are essentially you inheriting someone(s) mess in a way.
- UK-AL 1y agoIsn't that literally every distro? They're just curated pre installed packages.
- kachapopopow 1y agoI like it and that is all that matters also nowhere did I saw him taking credit for anything all it says that it is an opinionated linux distro.
- udev4096 1y agoI am not surprised that you have such a horrible taste. HN userbase is full of normies now, especially the ones who cannot think and have no more than 1 brain cell but yet again, that's the actual definition of a normie if I am being generous
- nevon 1y agoUsed this the other day when for whatever reason Gnome's built-in bluetooth GUI refused to connect to my headphones. Very nice and easy to use.
- Zaloog 1y agoNice work. Ive also build a TUI over blueutil (https://github.com/toy/blueutil https://github.com/toy/blueutil) for MacOs: https://github.com/Zaloog/blueutil-tui https://github.com/Zaloog/blueutil-tui Its written in python using the textual framework and displays the connections inline in your Terminal.
- bfkwlfkjf 1y agoWhat a coincidence, I just discovered this tool yesterday. It made me really happy how a tool so simple makes such a huge difference in terms of how smooth it is to solve a problem, compared eg with using bluetoothctl. It also occurred to me that there's a real value to tuis vs guis which is that since they're simpler to build with the same developer effort you can build more tools. I remember the dwarf fortress guys saying this in their interview, that they had at some point a similar game to DF but in 3d, but at some point they realized that by not wasting effort building the graphics part of the game they saved time to focus on what mattered. If I have one tiny criticism about bluetui is the annoying fonts. I understand what they're trying to do: with more glyphs you can increase the density of information. But the thing is it's not really necessary in this case. Like someone else commented, there's plenty of white space. I know to some people it feels like eye candy, but to me the emojis sprinkled in the text are an eye sore.
- pythops 1y agobluetui author here. > It made me really happy how a tool so simple makes such a huge difference in terms of how smooth it is to solve a problem, Happy to hear that :) > if I have one tiny criticism about bluetui is the annoying fonts You suggest to get rid of the icons ? what if they can be disabled in the config, will that fix the issue for you ? > there's plenty of white space You can set the window width from the config file (width = positive integer) if you don't want the TUI to be responsive.
- PostOnce 1y agoI think the icons are cool. Emoji in text is annoying, but this isn't a page of text, it's a UI element, and that can make something clear especially if you're connecting a device whose name is unknown, but you know it's a speaker, or whatever. So having the option to enable / disable is better than taking away the icons, in my opinion.
- alias_neo 1y agoAbsolutely this. Particularly when there might be a few unnamed devices, but you know your devices is a particular device class, you can guesstimate the correct device based on its class, and the icon is extremely useful for this!
- imiric 1y agoThis looks very nice! Is there a non-interactive CLI as well? I currently use `bluetoothctl` with a wrapper script and `expect` so that I can quickly fire off `bluetooth.sh <device name substring>`, and it does the tedium of ensuring that the connection is established regardless of my audio settings. I do still use `bluetoothctl` for manually scanning and pairing, but once a device is paired, I don't run it directly. So it would be great if I could solve both things with the same tool. I would only really need an interactive TUI for scanning and pairing. Maybe not even for that. E.g. if I run `bt pair <some device name>` then the tool could scan available devices and try to pair with one that fuzzily matches the provided name. And `scan` could work in a similar way. E.g. `bt scan --duration 10s` could show found devices within a specific time. I'm not a big fan of interactive UIs if the same can be accomplished non-interactively. This allows the tool to be scripted, and can be much quicker to do what you want. Does such a tool exist for Bluetooth? I'm tempted to whip something up myself, though I really have enough side projects as it is...
- general1465 1y agoI have tried to install it and got absolutely nowhere. 1. sudo apt install cargo on latest ubuntu and on attempt to "cargo install bluetui" it will say something about edition 2024 error. Because ubuntu is installing rust from 2023 and nobody bothered to update it? 2. Installing from https://rust-lang.org/tools/install/ https://rust-lang.org/tools/install/ will install rust only after removing existing version from 2023 (Why you won't just rewrite it?). Now I don't have cargo at all. 3. On attempt to use rustup it will tell me that path was not found. I need separate installation? I am sorry but WTF is this garbage? Seems like whole rust ecosystem is broken...
- imiric 1y agoHeh, my sympathies. Have you tried mise[1]? The last thing you probably want is to add another abstraction on top of this mess, but I've had good experiences with it, and it manages Rust, Go, Python, etc. environments very well. IME getting any modern toolchain setup on different distros can be problematic, especially if you mix in the often outdated distro packages. So using isolated environments with a tool specifically built for that works better. [1]: https://mise.jdx.dev/ https://mise.jdx.dev/
- calgoo 1y agoJust grab the latest build https://github.com/pythops/bluetui/releases https://github.com/pythops/bluetui/releases Apt packages are managed by the OS so its normal they don't get overwritten by tools you download of the internet directly as that could break other apps installed with apt. As a general rule, don't use coding tools from apt as they are normally out of date, install them from other sources
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago> Apt packages are managed by the OS so its normal they don't get overwritten by tools you download of the internet directly as that could break other apps installed with apt. I would, however, have expected it to shadow the OS version. That is, I would expect any installer running as your user to install eg. ~/.local/bin/rustc and ignore /usr/bin/rustc (and maybe print a message about making sure that ~/.local/bin takes precedence in your PATH).
- ekjhgkejhgk 1y agoOf all the Rust stuff that I've seen on HN, this is the first one that makes me go "maybe I should learn Rust". Not for the performance aspect, but because it seems so neat to be able to compile to a binary. I went to the releases page, I downloaded bluetui-x86_64-linux-gnu, and it works.
- SwiftyBug 1y agoFrom your comment, I'm assuming you're mostly familiar with interpreted languages. Chances are that you know JS/TS. If that's the case, I suggest that you give Go a go. The learning curve is way softer than Rust's and it's not too uncomfortable to someone who already knows TypeScript. And the advantage of Go over Rust is that the compile time is much, much shorter.
- jamesponddotco 1y agoI went from Bash to Go as a system admin, and eventually built something with Rust too, so I can definitely confirm that the Go learning curve is softer than Rust.
- me_vinayakakv 1y agoAgree. I immediately remembered k9s[1], a TUI to manage Kubernetes workloads. It is written in Go as well. [1]: https://github.com/derailed/k9s https://github.com/derailed/k9s
- pythops 1y agoI still think it's better to learn Rust https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOSxuaDgl3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOSxuaDgl3s
- gabrielgio 1y agoI only watch the go part, and I'll say that in 3 years working with I might have had at most 3 times nil pointer crashes in prod, in which took about 30 min between getting fixed and deployed. There are linter which helps prevent most of if not all crashes (just keep in mind to run linting and compile the binary it would still be ages faster than anything rust I have ever compiled). His argument is weak, and not simple. I'll give that type system in golang is too simplistic sometimes, and a more complex could help to express better some use cases. Still go for a person coming from a interpreted language is a solid choice by being MUCH MUCH simpler.
- rokkamokka 1y agoI was at a TUI Blue vacation resort a while back, thought for a minute this was related to that!
- pythops 1y agohahah nice one :D
- lazyfanatic42 1y agoWhat is with this wave of Text User Interface applications everywhere; and why does dev go through this type of cycle so often? Is it just new gen type behavior, so around 2030 we'll see a new wave of whatever and whatever? I refuse to be old man who yells at clouds, but I think just like the new gen can't help what comes, neither can I. I just feel so old sometimes because most of the "new ideas" aren't really at all; they just have a different language to describe the same thing.
- udev4096 1y agoNo one ever said TUIs are a new thing. It's been there since the beginning, when programs explicitly ran on terminals before WWW took off. It's the bloated web which ruined a lot of things
- WhyNotHugo 1y agoLots of language have pretty good tools for making TUIs. There's a good ratio between the time it takes to implement a TUI and its usefulness. Writing a GUI with equivalent functionality would typically be a lot more work, with no gains at all. Er, except maybe touchscreen and touch-gesture support, none of which would add any value for this kind of tool.
- globular-toast 1y ago> Writing a GUI with equivalent functionality would typically be a lot more work, with no gains at all. I disagree. Have you used something like tkinter? It's ridiculously easy to build GUIs. The trouble is if you build a GUI that way it will look kinda beige/crap whereas a TUI looks retro (but looks even worse to non-nerds).
- WhyNotHugo 1y agoApparently it had no Wayland support: https://discuss.python.org/t/feature-request-wayland-support-for-tkinter/75198 https://discuss.python.org/t/feature-request-wayland-support... So there’s another issues with GUIs, they might be fine on Xorg and have issues on Wayland (or viceversa). TUIs all work as long as your terminal emulator works.
- globular-toast 1y agoIs there something similar for wifi?
- nekiwo 1y agonmtui? it should be installed already if you have network manager
- pythops 1y agono everyone is using network manager. and personally I don't like as it is bloated tool trying to do everything and not being good at anything wifi => iwd => impala, iwctl, iwgtk blueooth => bluetoothd => bluetoothctl, bluetui ... vpn => coming soon ;)
- pythops 1y agoYes https://github.com/pythops/impala https://github.com/pythops/impala
- refracture 1y agoThis is great, thank you for making great TUI tools!
- alator21 1y agoI vibe coded(mostly) a bt tui for linux as well. You can check it out here https://github.com/alator21/bt-tui https://github.com/alator21/bt-tui.
- user3939382 1y agoHighly recommend on macos blueutil and aliasing these with your bluetooth devices IDs to bluetooth on+connect device in one command, bluetooth off. It’s more user friendly than any GUI workflow for repeat devices.
- Zaloog 1y agoIve built a TUI which utilizes blueutil [0]. It displays inline and supports j/k navigation. Also wrote a short post about its creation [1]. [0]:https://github.com/Zaloog/blueutil-tui https://github.com/Zaloog/blueutil-tui [1]:https://zaloog.github.io/2025/02/26/tui-a-day.html https://zaloog.github.io/2025/02/26/tui-a-day.html
- snowstormsun 1y agoI am using this every day, such a useful little tool!