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 found out: it used to be a lot less intuitive

Same. First thing I did was replace the action of the bluetooth icon in Waybar with bluetui.

Why not C, C++, Go or any other compiled language? What made you want ot learn rust?

From 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.

There's also a program in Go which does almost the same: https://github.com/bluetuith-org/bluetuith

Bluetui author here Happy to hear that :)

You can do it with any language that supports static linking, like C, C++, Go etc. You can also do it with things like Pyinstaller for Python. It's not that big of a deal tbh.

If it's good enough for Linus Torvalds, it's good enough for me :-)

I'm not a professional programmer, I just want to have more control over my computer. C seems like a full time job to learn and not shoot yourself in the foot.

> From your comment, I'm assuming you're mostly familiar with interpreted languages.

I'm proficient with Python and Julia, but I avoid Python as much as possible.

> The learning curve is way softer than Rust's

Ok, it might be easier, but then I'll have learned Go and not Rust :-)

I 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.

Agree. I immediately remembered k9s[1], a TUI to manage Kubernetes workloads.

It is written in Go as well.

[1]: https://github.com/derailed/k9s

This is anecdotal but I've been using bluetuith for a year on my nix machine with several adapters then switched to bluetui recently, and my experience with bluetui has been amazing. I just ran into issues all the time with bluetuith and I assumed it was due to the OS or something. An example I can think of is trusted connections- my devices just never automatically connected once switched on, but now they do.

Hi bluetui author. I just discovered your app last week, just wanted to say it is great.

I truly like this new generation of command line utils (I have bat, eza, etc aliased to things like cat and ls) and TUIs like yours. TUIs in particular: having grown up with DOS apps, then graduating to using Pine for email on a shell account, they are nostalgic, but also just super fast and practical. And I like having an option in between the command line and config files and a full-blown GUI app (which, on Linux, might look like any old random thing anyway).

I still think it's better to learn Rust

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOSxuaDgl3s

Have 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

omarchy 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

I 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.

> You suggest to get rid of the icons ? what if they can be disabled in the config, will that fix the issue for you ?

Yes.

In general, its a good idea to not rely on someone having installed nerdfonts / fonts with glyphs. Or at the very least offer fallback.

You can usually get pretty far by repurposing Unicode symbols.

For example, from Bamum:

  𖦤 Headphone
  𖦥 IEM
  𖤣 Mic
  ꚰ Warning
  𖥉 Bluetooth (had to get a little creative)

> what if they can be disabled in the config, will that fix the issue for you ?

I mean if you're offering, I would love that.

And thank you for releasing under GPL. <3

bluetui author here,

Thanks, glad you like it. And yes Big kudos to Orhun !

This kind of thing is what drives advanced users from debian based distros to things like Arch and Nixos. With niche tools like this that don't have official packages, having a easy way for users to share build scripts, and have them managed by the package manager is a life saver.

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.

[1]: https://mise.jdx.dev/

You could use docker to build and then run the resulting binary without.

Can't get this to work either. Downloaded the release because I'm not touching any Rust tools, but it doesn't run.

  $ ./bluetui-x86_64-linux-gnu
  Error: Error { kind: Internal(DBus("org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.TimedOut")), message: "Failed to activate service 'org.bluez': timed out (service_start_timeout=25000ms)" }

I have Bluez installed. Comes with Debian KDE by default I guess, because didn't install it myself.

It absolutely is a big deal that you can run “cargo build” with no set up and things just work. Out of the languages you listed, Go is the other where it’s that easy.

nmtui? it should be installed already if you have network manager

Just grab the latest build 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

I had similar with just (a make replacement) and debian 12. It seems requiring the latest of everything is the latest trend of rust ecosystem.

How long have you been using ubuntu? From my past unpleasant experience of using it, one thing I learned is never rely on apt for package updates. Most will just keep rotting and hardly get any updates. It's the same with debian. Either use install scripts from packages or switch to a much more serious distro like Arch, where packages are always updated

There's probably nicer ways to express that criticism

I 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.

> 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).

no 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 ;)

That has always been the trend in the rust ecosystem. It's not a new thing.

For the compiler in particular, it's pretty common practice to depend on a recent version. The backward compatibility situation is generally excellent, so the only real challenge is getting the compiler installed. That's generally straightforward with rustup, and Debian/Ubuntu also package several versions (under different package names) that are more recent than the distro's default.

No offense but this is the most 'i use arch btw' comment I've seen in a while.

I agree with simplicity and ease of learning Go.

> 3 years working with I might have had at most 3 times nil pointer crashes in prod

I've been running a rust app for my personal trading app and a small service at a very large FAANG company for more than 3 years, and guess what I'm yet to see a nil crash.

that'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

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.

I agree on the easiness of Go, but I don't think people should always choose the easy solution. The easiness of Go come at a cost.

> Have you considered a network manager?

I've used "nmtui" on Linux for many years to do this. "nm" = "Network Manager".

Isn't that literally every distro? They're just curated pre installed packages.

Absolutely 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!

> In general, its a good idea to not rely on someone having installed nerdfonts / fonts with glyphs. Or at the very least offer fallback.

This bears emphasis; I sometimes use tools that try to use fancy fonts for icons, and it just gives me unreadable symbols because I don't have the font installed. And you might reasonably say, "just install the font package", but that only works if the font is packaged for my system, and I know what package it's in.

For Bluetooth, you could of course use one or both of the runes upon which the logo was based: ᛡᛒ

sure, feel free to open a github issue and I will do my best to implement it asap :)

Apparently it had no Wayland support: 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.

It's open source, you can fork it :)

Agree, people should understand why they are picking a language. If it is to learn new language that is fast, compiles to a binary (also fast) and has a nice onboard experience for a person coming from a interpreted language (which is the topic of thread) go fits nicely.

Rust is not always the answer just because it has "no nil exception". The correctness of Rust comes at a cost as well.

That method isn't entirely reliable either: all come out at “question mark in a box” (Chrome, Edge) or “codepoint hex in box” (FF) on the old Win10 box that I'm currently trying to retire. The come out find on a similarly default Win11 setup.

While the issue here is Win10, it shows that the problem is client font sensitive so it might affect others too (perhaps those running old-but-still-supported Linux distro releases with default fonts).

Have you thought that you may want the window for this to be super small and that whitespace you see no longer exists?

That has nothing to do with this author and everything to do with you.

It'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.

Adapt based on window size? Either hide/truncate less essential information when the width goes below a threshold, or make each entry multi-line if you require showing all of it. This is not exactly a new approach, I can resize my Foobar2000 window and the playlist columns will stay proportional to the window, and that seems to be using fairly standard windows components to the extent it wouldn't look out of place 30 years ago.

We've had scrollbars for several decades, before the same stupid "designers" destroyed them.

bluetui author there

You can set a window with in the config file (with = positive integer) and TUI will be displayed with this width even in a large screen.

https://github.com/pythops/bluetui?tab=readme-ov-file#custom...

Zero attempt to answer my original question. Looks like I've stepped into another pit of toxic positivity here.

The whole ecosystem of charm tools are well made. But most of them are extremely bloated and requires tons of dependencies to build a TUI

I 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

> all come out at “question mark in a box” (Chrome, Edge) or “codepoint hex in box” (FF) on the old Win10 box that I'm currently trying to retire. The come out find on a similarly default Win11 setup.

This is pretty funny to me, because on plain ol' Firefox on NixOS everything looks just fine!

We've come pretty far from the days when things were randomly broken on Linux..

Hardcoding any color than base16 is usually a poor choice. It should be up to the user to use any other color.

And colors should be semantic. If you don’t have any theming ability, just use reverse video to indicate selected state.

My current pet peeve is cli tools using ansi codes for progress bar. And with very poor detection of terminals.

For curseradio under OpenBSD, I just replaced bold for reverse in the Python code for the selected and/or highlighted radio station. It works much better this way.

Firefox on Fedora 43 here, no joy, and indeed, randomly broken on Linux (too).

[edit] Okey, so installing the complete Google Noto Fonts family resolved this issue. But I still don't know if relying on a script with almost no font support is any better than what the OP did.

No I just like an (alleged) racist and (alleged) transphobe and really resonate with DHH /s.

But seriously, it's a very nice distro - everything works and setup is a bliss. The themes are nice (for someone who uses black and white for quite literally everything), everything following consistent theming - sure there's some headscratchers like Google Photos, etc, but the no frills installer (default btrfs with mount arguments I'd use coming out of the box). This is also coming from a debian fanboy. I really like the general consistency of keybinds as well and things just make sense it really feels like you can just load it up and get some work done it actually made me use my laptop more instead of never and made me take a genuine attempt at using neovim instead of trying for an hour and just going back to bugbrains lagfest 2026.

--

on a side note, catchyos hyprland is something else alright, you should maybe rant about that instead or hyprland in general.

It's not even a distro lmao. You are fully DHH-pilled. I would point you to this article: https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy/, although it hardly covers the main points, it's still good enough to explain what's actually wrong with that bloated INSTALL SCRIPT, NOT a distro!

ok so what is a distro then? distrowatch seems happy to consider omarchy a 'distribution' and how about catchyos, it's just a kde installer with 2 setup screens slapped in front bundled with a custom kernel and an install script for post install kernel configuration.

what is arch anyway? just a kernel repository and a package manager?

I didn't know anything about DHH before omarchy I just saw a youtube video about some guy trying it out and had a go on my laptop that I never used before and I like it, it fits the way I want to interact with my laptop as a baseline one of the first things I did is remove all the frills (screenlocker being the first ones to go) and I found it really easy in general to de-dhh whatever I didn't like about the distro/installscript/flavor/whateveryouwanttocallit and remove pulling updates from the omarchy repository and use my own gitea fork instead to possibly use on future installations or reformats.

On the servers I am running a debootstrap installed ubuntu (better hw support) that come in at less than 1gb size, but for a desktop that has 1.7tb of project files I could care less about a bloated desktop image.