Bluetui – A TUI for managing Bluetooth on Linux

(github.com)

108 points | by birdculture 8 hours ago

9 comments

  • bfkwlfkjf 23 minutes ago
    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.

    • pythops 3 minutes ago
      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.

  • Zaloog 1 hour ago
    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.

  • rjzzleep 3 hours ago
    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.

    • pythops 2 minutes ago
      Bluetui author here Happy to hear that :)
  • nevon 2 hours ago
    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.
  • kachapopopow 2 hours ago
    I wonder why omarchy isn't using this yet.
    • kachapopopow 2 hours ago
      I found out: it used to be a lot less intuitive
  • hombre_fatal 4 hours ago
    Much better than bluetuith which has weirdly bad UI/keybindings.
  • imvetri 2 hours ago
    does TUI stand for terminal user interface ?
    • unwind 1 hour ago
      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

    • caymanjim 2 hours ago
      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.
      • EgregiousCube 1 hour ago
        Not to be confused with CLI, which is literally for people who spend a lot of time on the Command Line :)
  • gbin 5 hours ago
    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.
  • userbinator 2 hours ago
    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?
    • dymk 57 minutes ago
      There's probably nicer ways to express that criticism
      • userbinator 7 minutes ago
        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.
        • lysp 1 minute ago
          That has nothing to do with this author and everything to do with you.