Sometimes tech irony hits hard. My Raspberry Pi’s Bluetooth mouse stopped working after I moved the SD card to another Pi. I thought it would be simple to open the Bluetooth menu and pair it again, but without a mouse there was no way to click the little Bluetooth icon.
I tried to use MouseKeys so the keyboard could control the pointer, but it did not work because Raspberry Pi OS was running Wayland. The old X11 trick with setxkbmap only gave me a warning. Navigating with the keyboard alone was awkward because the default Bluetooth applet is not designed for keyboard use.
The next option was bluetoothctl in the terminal. It does the job, but scanning fills the screen with constant output. Filtering by the device name helped a little, but it still was not smooth.
The real breakthrough came when I installed Blueman, a more advanced Bluetooth manager:
sudo apt install blueman
blueman-manager
With Blueman I could use the Tab and arrow keys to move around, select my mouse, pair it, and get back to work. The only side effect was ending up with two Bluetooth icons in the tray.
In the end I could remove Blueman with sudo apt purge blueman or keep it for easier keyboard navigation. The lesson I learned is to always have a backup plan for pairing Bluetooth devices or keep a spare wired mouse nearby. This also reminded me how important it is for any desktop environment to provide basic accessibility features so users are never locked out of essential settings.
Software developer. Defender of Kaer Morhen. Based in the U.S.