impala - A TUI for managing wifi on Linux
16 points by pythops
16 points by pythops
Prerequisites:
A Linux based OS with iwd installed.
So an iwd frontend.
I don’t think that I use iwd on any of my wireless devices… (I know I use NetworkManager, which I think is used instead of iwd?) and I don’t really want to switch just to use this.
I wonder if it would make more sense to separate the model from the code that manages iwd, such that other backend drivers could be implemented.
people have asked for NetworkManager as backend and there is an issue open for that. It is just not a prio right now. you really don't need NetworkManager unless you want convenience using VPNs. iwd is simple and does only WiFi and does it well, NetworkManager tries to do lot of things and I personally don't like that approach.
I built wifitui to work with networkmanager (and other backends too), if you'd like to give another alternative a try: https://github.com/shazow/wifitui/
It was inspired by pythops' excellent work on impala. :)
god bless ability to write llm-assisted code in areas one would never venture into otherwise. Will check your tool out
god bless ability to write llm-assisted code in areas one would never venture into otherwise.
Indeed! I've been maintaining meatcode for two decades so this has been an interesting experiment to see if I can make an LLM-assisted codebase that I would be willing to maintain and get any productivity boost out of it.
The one unintuitive result is that I feel you need to be willing to put in ~equivalent baseline effort to get to some milestone that you would without a coding agent, and sacrifice some of the fun aspects of work (less writing fun datastructures and more acting as a maintainer of a popular project -- reviewing, commenting, testing, rebasing PR's all day). With equivalent baseline effort (non-trivial) and some sacrifice of fun, I was able to exceed my milestones substantially (not sure how much, maybe 2-3x).
I think most people approach it from a perspective of "if I put in trivial effort, I should be able to get non-trivial output" but that's a very lossy approach. To maintain quality, I still have to review thoroughly, do substantial pushback, often structure substantial refactors to pull the codebase back from slowly degrading, etc.
Anyway, just braindumping some thoughts so far, I should write more about it soon. :)
Will check your tool out
Let me know what you think, if it's missing anything for you.
iwd is basically the modern incarnation of a library/daemon for managing wireless on linux, supplanting wpa_supplicant. NetworkManager can use it as a backend, and I think by default modern distributions have it enabled.
I was using impala for quite a while when experimenting with all-things-systemd It's quite nice with some minor issues like broken theme when using light terminal (it's so common I stopped giving a damn)