Setting a hotkey for connecting and disconnecting a network connection in KDE environment

Control of the NetworkManger

The NetworkManger can be controlled from the commandline:

man nmcli:

NAME
       nmcli – command‐line tool for controlling NetworkManager

SYNOPSIS
       nmcli  [ OPTIONS ] OBJECT { COMMAND | help }
...

The man page on the net: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/saucy/man1/nmcli.1.html

With the dbus:

• Configuration of the Network Manager via DBus: how to set the ad hoc mode
• http://cheesehead-techblog.blogspot.fi/2012/09/dbus-tutorial-fun-with-network-manager.html

Example - working at here:

Disconnecting from the current network connection and staying disconnected:

qdbus --system --literal  org.freedesktop.NetworkManager /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/0 org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.Device.Disconnect

Connecting the network with th UUID:

1) Reading the UUID:

nmcli -p c

At here the UUID is 81540c01-2377-4d79-9763-d0f3104c81f3

2) Activating the connection:

nmcli c up uuid 81540c01-2377-4d79-9763-d0f3104c81f3

Hotkeys

One way to add the shortcuts/hotkeys is to use the KDE menu editor.

The command can be added to the KDE menu with a shortcut to run the command.

The KDE document can be found: K-Menu > Applications > Help ...

The KDE menu editor handbook on the net: http://docs.kde.org/development/en/kde-workspace/kmenuedit/index.html

Thanks to user26687 these are the commands I use for reconnecting:

$ nmcli -p c
$ nmcli c up uuid 6e6c6430-ffae-4dc3-aeb8-60a89fa63796

the first one to get uuid. If there's one connection, one use

nmcli c up uuid  "$(nmcli -t -f uuid c)"

instead.

And these are what I use to disconnect:

$ nmcli dev status
$ nmcli dev disconnect iface eth1

For me, qdbus is useless because of upgrading to Qt5. To give it a toggling nature which is needed to set a single hotkey for both enabling and disabling, probably a C++ code is appropriate for combining and automating these commands (time-consuming for me). Two hotkeys amy be better for me. I use this method for setting a hotkey for a command: https://askubuntu.com/a/393343/126106

Still I worry about uuid (to be volatile).