I recently moved to using XMonad semi-fulltime, which is working out nicely most of the time. However the one sticking point is that when I try to work somewhere other than my flat or my office I had to drop to the command line and use nmcli to connect to wifi or to enable my builtin 4G modem.
This is less than ideal, there doesn't appear to by any simple NetworkManager popup/interface I could integrate easily with my xmobar setup - I wanted to have a little icon launch a UI that allowed me to the wifi network to connect to or switch on my 4G modem.
To address this I put together a little python app using Tkinter which updates network connectivity settings through NetworkManager's D-Bus API. The app is launched by clicking an area on Xmobar containing the dynnetwork widget beside a neat little old-school TTY icon:
Clicking this area will raise a menu like the below - listing WiFi and Modem interfaces
Above you can see that /dev/cdc-wdm0 is connected to my "Vodafone CZ" connection - there's a little chain icon beside it. Clicking on this connection would disconnect. Selecting one of the WiFi networks would have either connected automatically (if it was Open) or raised a popup asking for a password (if it was password-protected).
To achieve this you need to do a couple of simple things. Firstly ensure that the necessary dependencies are installed, and checkout the code
$ sudo apt-get install python-tk python-networkmanager
$ git clone https://github.com/smcl/xnm
Then ensure your xmobar template has the following line, which will display the dynnetwork info beside a TTY (assuming Font Awesome is installed as Additional Font #1 in xmobar):
<action=`/home/sean/.xmonad/xnm.py`>%dynnetwork% <fn=1></fn></action>
And that's it!