Set a shortcut to toggle bluetooth on or off

Question

Is there a way to do this without installing extra packages?

Answer 1

You can control whether your bluetooth signal is enabled with rfkill. Wrapping this in a little Bash conditional allows you to toggle the state easily:

#!/bin/bash
if rfkill list bluetooth | grep -q 'yes$' ; then 
    rfkill unblock bluetooth
else
    rfkill block bluetooth
fi

You could save the above in a script file anywhere (e.g. ~/bin/toggle-bluetooth) and make it executable (chmod +x FILENAME) to be able to bind that command to a keyboard shortcut in the system settings.

Alternatively, you can put it in a single line bash command and directly paste that into the shortcut:

bash -c "if rfkill list bluetooth|grep -q 'yes$';then rfkill unblock bluetooth;else rfkill block bluetooth;fi"

Answer 2

If you want to not only toggle bluetooth itself, but also the connection to a specific device, you could use the script below. I use it in Ubuntu 20.04 to toggle my bluetooth connection to my speakers. It checks if the connection is already established or not and toggles it accordingly.

Note that it has the MAC address of my speakers hardcoded.

!/bin/bash
Toggle connection to bluetooth device
mac="90:03:B7:17:00:08" # DEH-4400BT
if bluetoothctl info "$mac" | grep -q 'Connected: yes'; then
    echo "Turning off $mac"
    bluetoothctl disconnect || echo "Error $?"
else
    echo "Turning on $mac"
    # turn on bluetooth in case it's off
    rfkill unblock bluetooth
bluetoothctl power on
bluetoothctl connect "$mac"
sink=$(pactl list short sinks | grep bluez | awk '{print $2}')

if [ -n "$sink" ]; then
    pacmd set-default-sink "$sink" && echo "OK default sink : $sink"
else
    echo could not find bluetooth sink
    exit 1
fi

fi