A command-line tool to communicate with OpenIntelWireless's itlwm. Works in macOS Recovery.

ItlwmCLI is a small TUI to directly interact with itlwm (the Intel WiFi driver for macOS). Note that this does not work for AirportItlwm.

ItlwmCLI is more manual than HeliPort, but it does the same stuff. It's made with FTXUI and HeliPort's ClientKit, and therefore theoretically has the same capabilities as HeliPort.

This tool also works in macOS Recovery, even though HeliPort does not. You just need to download the binary and place it somewhere accessible by macOS (note that macOS Sonoma and Sequoia can't automatically mount exFAT) and run the binary from the terminal (Utilities > Terminal).

To open it, simply run the binary. You can double-click it from Finder, or use the command line to start it.

• macOS Sierra (10.12) through macOS Tahoe (26) (64-bit).
  • Don't meet these requirements? Check out ItlwmCLILegacy.
• itlwm (not AirportItlwm). itlwm is the driver that presents your Intel WiFi card as Ethernet, and AirportItlwm presents your card as a WiFi card.

ItlwmCLI may look complex at first, but it's really not. (In my humble opinion)

_{Note that this screenshot might be slightly outdated.}

The top row is the header. This tells you about ItlwmCLI, and about itlwm itself.

The top left section shows you about the active connection. It tells you itlwm's status in the top line. (Note that Idle (Default) doesn't always mean itlwm is actually idle. It's the default status returned.) The second line tells you the WiFi standard, the interface being used, and the current WiFi channel you're on. The third line tells you what SSID you're connected too, and the fourth line tells you the current RSSI of your connection. (see below)

The bottom left is a graph that streams your RSSI values. A higher value means a better RSSI, and a lower value is a worse RSSI. It's constantly moving and displaying your RSSI. The graph is relative to the highest RSSI itlwm's reported and the lowest RSSI itlwm's reported.

The right section lists all networks detected by itlwm. It shows the SSID and the RSSI (see below). It'll also show (locked) if the network has security and (connected) if you're already connected to it.

The bottom section is the command line of this. You type your command and press enter. All arguments are positional, and can be surrounded by either single quotes (') or double quotes ("). To start, try help to display more commands. In this command line, you can't go back to previously-used commands (maybe some day), but up/down scrolls you in the terminal logs. Left/right also scrolls you, well, left and right.

Note: To exit this app quickly, you can just type e and press enter (it's the same thing as typing exit), and you don't just immediately terminate it!

That should be all, hope you enjoy! Note that this tool can safely be closed, and itlwm will stay in whatever state you set it to.

• RSSI is a way to measure signal strength, and it's always negative. The closer it is to 0, the better your connection is. If it's super far away from 0 (like -90), that WiFi connection is not good. Typically -30 to -50 is really good, and -80 to -90 is pretty bad.

Requirements:

• macOS (because it has specific header files that HeliPort needs)
• HeliPort (run git submodule update --init)
• fmt and ftxui installed (I installed from Brew)
  • You just need the header filed from these packages. The compiler uses included library files for static compilation.

• OpenIntelWireless for itlwm
• OpenIntelWireless for HeliPort/ClientKit
  • Note: I had to make a copy (and edit said copy) of their Api.h to make it work with C++
• FTXUI for the TUI framework
• fmt (I tried to use Qt's QStrings at first, but I couldn't get Qt to work in Recovery; fmt was a very easy replacement)
• nlohmann/json for doing exactly what you think it does, being an awesome JSON library.
• gulrak/filesystem for letting me compile lower than Catalina.
• The LLVM Project for a static version of the standard library (libc++ and libc++abi)
• Apple for macOS (even though it's a love-hate relationship)