Feature request - Cinnamon - add a right-click context menu to wireless networks in the Network system tray applet

[Keith-Y-2]

Hi there, this is my first time here (or showing my face on GitHub in general) so apologies for any faux pas I make here.

I'd like to submit a feature request for the Network applet, the code for which can be found here: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/tree/master/files/usr/share/cinnamon/applets/network%40cinnamon.org

Current behaviour:
when you right click on a wifi network in the system tray's network dropdown, it has exactly the same effect as left clicking it. There is no direct way to access a network's properties, or forget a network, from the system tray dropdown - accessing those things requires the user to click into the Network connections window (I also believe the Network connections window could do with some improvement, but will address that on another occasion) and navigate from there.

Proposed behaviour:
In my view, it would be more intuitive for users if a right click context menu was available on the system tray dropdown for options specific to each wireless network, and that this would allow for a more rapid access to the relevant options for non-technical users such as myself.

Proposed right click context menu options:
For networks without a saved connection:

• Connect (same as left click, but it would be confusing for the user if some wifi networks did not have a right click context menu and others did)

For networks with a saved connection, but which are not currently connected:

• Connect
• Auto-connect (toggle, indicated with a tickbox when enabled)
• Properties (opens nm-connection-editor)
• Forget Network (causes a confirmation dialogue popup)

For the currently connected network:

• Disconnect
• Auto-connect (toggle, indicated with a tickbox when enabled)
• Properties (opens nm-connection-editor)
• Forget Network (with confirmation dialogue)

Left click behaviour is entirely unchanged.

---

I'll @ @mtwebster here as he made the most recent commit on the network applet and generally seems to be pretty involved with everything around here!

I've already created an implementation for this (with the caveat that I am not a programmer and the actual coding has been done by AI) which I've attached to this post as applet.js down at the bottom of the post.

applet_test.js (also attached) includes a bit of extra logging as well as the test module I used to fake some wifi connections in the UI so that I could actually see if it worked on a VM (my main system is on mint 22.2 so the up-to-date code was not compatible and I could not test on it).

I've done the best I can to test and make sure it's not breaking anything, but ultimately this is code that I (a newbie and non-programmer) have been the only one involved with, and as such has been entirely vibe coded. I've taken all the precautions I can (getting AI to review it, trying to brainstorm and account for ways that it might break things, testing, etc.) to avoid this just being a slop dump but it's entirely possible that the code is garbage for some reason I don't understand.

This code has been tested in a VM with the test module on the most recent Mint 22.3 beta, and I could not see any obvious problems. the implementation is a bit hacky because cinnamon applets really seem to hate having right click context menus appearing and dissapearing.

I'm pretty sure the attached code will not work if slotted into Mint 22.2, due to the new icon changes in 22.3.

Things that still need work:

• making sure that it's properly using system theme colours (most of them work, but the menu background colour does not. it looks fine on default mint but might be bad on a light theme if the fallback background colour is too close to the theme text colour)
• finding something that looks a bit nicer than the current unicode tickbox for indicating auto-connect status
• confirming that text is properly translated when the OS is in non-english languages.
• consideration of whether it's better to hide contextual options where they are not relevant, or gray them out. currently they are hidden.
• it's a bit over-commented in that way that AI code is, but I've left all that in for now as it should help anyone whose skimming it over for now

Code:
applet.js
applet_test.js

[Keith-Y-2]

realised I probably should have included a couple of screenshots to show what it looks like: