iwdrofimenu

Minimalistic WiFi network chooser for iwd with a rofi frontend.

Overview

A simple network chooser written in Python 3 and mainly for fun and my own use. It is a script for rofi and works as a frontend for iwd/iwctl. The functionality is very basic. It is only possible to list networks, connect/disconnect, show details of the active connection, and remove the active connection from the known networks.

iwdrofimenu can run in two slightly different modes. A normal mode where it is possible to manage the connections, and an other mode optimized for rofi's combi mode. In this less interactive mode only known (available) networks and less options are listed.

iwd (iNet Wireless Daemon) is a small, standalone wireless network daemon that seems to be much more resource-friendly than networkmanager (which I used before). It doesn't depend on a lot of other stuff (no need for wpa_supplicant or dhcpd anymore) and has a great text-based interface. However, I was used to networkmanager's ncurses frontend and I wanted something similar, that is easy to use and fits into my i3 setup, so I wrote this little program.

Screenshots

main dialog

connection details

main dialog with rofis -no-config flag

integrated with other modes

Dependencies

As you probably guessed, you need a working installation of iwd, rofi and Python 3 to use this script. All of these can be obtained from the official repositories of your favorite Linux distribution. You also need to install the Python library pexpect which you should also find with your distributions packet manager (e.g. in Arch it's python-pexpect). Otherwise you can install it with Python's package manager by running

pip install pexpect

However, if you currently do not use iwd, you may not want to switch your wifi daemon as it may cause issues with integrated network buttons and other features in your Linux distribution's desktop environment.

Installation

To try it out

If you want to try it out, get your copy and run it as rofi script

git clone https://github.com/defname/rofi-iwd-wifi-menu
cd rofi-iwd-wifi-menu
rofi -show wifi -modi "wifi:./iwdrofimenu.py"

With some luck, it just works out of the box. If it's not working, setting the name of your wifi device in a configuration file might help. To find out the name of your device run

iwctl device list

and look it up in the first column (it should be something similar to wlan0 what's the default setting).

There are different possible locations for the configuration file, but if you only want to try it out, you can just create the file in the scripts root directory (where you should be located after above commands):

echo -e "[general]\ndevice=<DEVICENAME>" > iwdrofimenu.conf

Replace <DEVICENAME> with the name of your wifi device.

To learn more about where to place the config file and what options there are, see the Configuration section

Installation

If it works for you, you can install the script more permanently. You can install it system wide or in you home directory. For system wide installation run

sudo make install

This will copy the script files to a subdirectory of /usr/share and create a symlink to the executable in /usr/bin.

To install it in you home directory (or somewhere else) run

DESTDIR=~/.local make install

The behaviour is as described above, but everything happens in the specified directory, not in /usr. (You have to make sure ~/.local/bin exists and that it is in your PATH)

If you use Arch Linux you can also install from AUR (iwdrofimenu-git).

Usage

When iwdrofimenu is installed you can run it with

rofi -show wifi -modi "wifi:iwdrofimenu"

You can also add it to your global rofi configuration by adding WiFi:iwdrofimenu to the modi entry in your ~/.config/rofi/config.rasi:

configuration {
    /* ... */
    modi: "drun,filebrowser,window,wifi:iwdrofimenu";
    /* ... */
}

To use it in rofi's combi-mode you can either run it directly with

rofi -show combi -modi combi -combi-modi drun,wifi:"iwdrofimenu --combi-mode"

or you change your rofi configuration to something like

configuration {
    /* ... */
    modi: "combi,drun,filebrowser,wifi:iwdrofimenu"
    combi-modi: "drun,run,wifi:iwdrofimenu --combi-mode"
    /* ... */
}

and simply run

rofi -show combi

For more information on how to use rofi and it's different modes check the rofi (1) manpages

Configuration

The appearance of rofi depends on your local settings and will most likely differ from the images above. rofi has many options for styling and a lot of great themes are out there (for example those are pretty awesome in my oppinion). For more information on customizing your rofi setup refer to the rofi-theme (5) manpages).

Note that iwdrofimenu marks the list elements for active connections as active and for known connections as urgent, so they can be styled within the rofi configuration easily.

Still, there are some customizations that can be made through a configuration file. You can overwrite rofi settings with a custom theme for the script, change every single string displayed, and change the icons.

Configuration Files

The script will look for configurations in the following files in the given order.

<INSTALLDIR>/iwdrofimenu.conf
~/.config/rofi/iwdrofimenu.conf
~/.config/iwdrofimenu/config
~/.config/iwdrofimenu.conf
~/.iwdrofimenu.conf

None of these files will be created automatically, so choose a location that fits your setup.

To create a file you can obtain the default configuration filled with every possible setting by running

iwdrofimenu --config

Write it to the file of your choice with

iwdrofimenu --config > ~/.config/iwdconfig.conf

In this file you should remove all the settings you don't want to change, for the case the default configuration changes in future versions (otherwise all the defaults will be overwritten by this file).

Basic Configuration

The configuration file is in the INI fileformat, consisting of the sections general, templates and icons. Here I will only discuss the parts that you are most likely to want to change.

WiFI Device

You can specify the wifi device to use with the device option in the general section. For more information how to figure out the name of your wifi device look in the Installation section.

Icon Set

The standard installation comes with two icon sets to choose. Use dark or light for the img_subdir option, to change it.

Overwrite global rofi settings

You can overwrite global settings by specify a .rasi file with the rofi_theme_file option. This option is set to <install_dir>/res/style.rasi by default to overwrite one single rofi setting. It is the tab-stops property of element-text elements to align the values in the connection details dialog of iwdrofimenu property.

This might cause problems if iwdrofimenu is used together with other modules, since in this case this setting is overwritten for all other modules too. If so you can set rofi_theme_file but leave it empty, so no .rasi-file will be loaded seperatly from the global rofi configuration.

Deactivate the Separator

Per default a separator line is displayed between the control-elements and the network list entries. Set show_separator to False to deactivate it. (You can also customize the separator with a Template)

Templates

You can change every string value output by iwdwifimenu through string templates in the templates section of the configuration file. Most of them are simple strings, but in some cases, you can use variables (starting with $) which will be replaced. In the default configuration (which you can obtain by calling iwdrofimenu --config) all possible variables are used, so you can explore and play around by yourself (most of it should be pretty obvious). In the templates it is possible to use Pango Markup for changing the font-color, weight, etc differently from the rofi theme.

Bugs

Please be aware that this script may contain bugs that I am currently unaware of, as I have no possibilities to thoroughly test it. If you encounter any problems, feel free to open an issue so that I can attempt to resolve them.

Limitations

It's not possibly to connect to hidden networks so far. (I'm even not sure if they show up in the list if they are already known). I never needed this feature and also have no easy possibility to test it. If it's something you really miss, let me know, maybe I find some time and add it.

Similar projects

Although there are a variety of alternatives that utilize NetworkManager, I could find only one that uses iwd (and this one I couldn't get running...).

• rofi-wifi-menu: A rofi wifi menu that uses networkmanager in the background
• rofi-iwd-menu: Another one existing for iwd, but I couldn't get it to work, that's why I started this little project.