One thing about moving to a tiling window manager like awesome wm or i3 is that
they are so lightweight they are all missing things like bluetooth gui's out of
the box, and you generally bring your own. Today I just needed to connet a new
set of headphones, so I decided to just give the bluetoothctl cli a try. It
seems to come with Ubuntu, I don't think I did anything to get it.
bluetoothctl
Running bluetoothctl pops you into a repl/shell like bah, python, or ipython.
From here you can execute bluetoothctl commands.
Here is what I had to do to connect my headphones.
# list out the commands available
help
# scan for new devices and stop when you see your device show up
scan on
scan off
# list devices
devices
paired-devices
# pair the device
pair XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
# now your device should show up in the paired list
paired-devices
# connet the device
connect XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
help
Here is the output of the help menu on my machine, it seems pretty straight forward to block, and remove devices from here.
note ctrl revers to the bluetooth controller on the machine you are on, and dev refers to a device id.
Menu main:
Available commands:
-------------------
advertise Advertise Options Submenu
scan Scan Options Submenu
gatt Generic Attribute Submenu
list List available controllers
show [ctrl] Controller information
select <ctrl> Select default controller
devices List available devices
paired-devices List paired devices
system-alias <name> Set controller alias
reset-alias Reset controller alias
power <on/off> Set controller power
pairable <on/off> Set controller pairable mode
discoverable <on/off> Set controller discoverable mode
agent <on/off/capability> Enable/disable agent with given capability
default-agent Set agent as the default one
advertise <on/off/type> Enable/disable advertising with given type
set-alias <alias> Set device alias
scan <on/off> Scan for devices
info [dev] Device information
pair [dev] Pair with device
trust [dev] Trust device
untrust [dev] Untrust device
block [dev] Block device
unblock [dev] Unblock device
remove <dev> Remove device
connect <dev> Connect device
disconnect [dev] Disconnect device
menu <name> Select submenu
version Display version
quit Quit program
exit Quit program
help Display help about this program
Final Impressions
This was something that I have never used, and thought it would be intimidating but it worked great first try out of the box. It could have been my device on the other end, but this was one of the least frustrations I have had pairing a new device.