Minimal TUI Wi-Fi Manager

Good news! If you don't want to install third party daemons, gooey GUI things, or bloat just so you can connect to a wireless access point, then don't worry, Linux has all the CLI tools necessary to create a minimal on-demand TUI shell script thing to connect to, and manage these very Wi-Fi connections. The following info is for Debian, however the approach will be the same for other distros, including BSD operating systems that will differ mostly for some of the network commands.

The use case here is as follow:

• don't connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot unless I explicitly ask the COMPUTAR to do so
• if I need to connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot, the COMPUTAR should give me a list of the visible ones
• a user-friendly™ interface with fuzzy search should help me tell the COMPUTER which hotspot I want to connect to
• if the Wi-Fi hotspot is already known, connect to it
• if the Wi-Fi hotspot is unknown, ask for the password, save it, and connect to it

The things that mater

• /etc/network/interfaces — network interface configuration for ifup and ifdown
• iw — show/manipulate wireless devices and their configuration
• wpa_cli — WPA command line client
• wpa_supplicant and wpa_supplicant.conf — Wi-Fi Protected Access client and IEEE 802.1X supplicant and its configuration file
• fzf — command line fuzzy finder