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What 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.
bluetui 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.
I 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.
Bluetui author here Happy to hear that :)
Nice work. Ive also build a TUI over blueutil (https://github.com/toy/blueutil) for MacOs:
https://github.com/Zaloog/blueutil-tui
Its written in python using the textual framework and displays the connections inline in your Terminal.
I 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/ 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...
Heh, 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.
Used 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.
I wonder why omarchy isn't using this yet.
I found out: it used to be a lot less intuitive
This 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...
Much better than bluetuith which has weirdly bad UI/keybindings.
does TUI stand for terminal user interface ?
My 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
Yes. 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.
Not to be confused with CLI, which is literally for people who spend a lot of time on the Command Line :)
Yet 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.
Why 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?
There's probably nicer ways to express that criticism
I'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.
That has nothing to do with this author and everything to do with you.
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code