TL;DR: BUILD.md

This is unofficial GUI for NordVPN CLI desktop client. It is written for my own purpose, and I am not affiliated to the NordVPN team in no way. Used titles, logo and so on are the property of legal rights holders. The NordVPN has no responsibility for this application nor the results of its usage. Neither I have:

GNU LGPL v.3: This application is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Being too lazy to use the provided CLI or even to bind it to keyboard shortcuts, I wanted a quick way to get the connection status or setup/break the connection with a few mouse clicks. These, basically, are the main features placed in the system tray:

To fit with arbitrary desktop theming, yangl supports tray icon customization. For each status

• Unknown;
• Connecting;
• Connected;
• Disconnecting; — Not implemented (yet?)
• Disconnected

it is possible to use custom icon. You can set arbitrary image as a main icon for the system tray entry, and/or an additional informative sub-icon to be rendered in the bottom-right quarter:

yangl's context menu provides three type of actions — the yangl, NordVPN and Extra. First one is for internal actions to manage the yangl itself, others are just wrappers on an application and its command line arguments to be called with ­­— NordVPN CLI or any arbitrary application/script.

It's a list of predefined wrappers (and its combinations) for existent NordVPN switches, llike Connect, Disconnect, turn KillSwitch On/Off or Rate connection, etc.

An ability to run your own application/script. In my case, the NordVPN client some time stops working after hibernation and it's the place to restart it with a single click:

It's possible to configure any action in runtime:

• Title — action's visible title;
• Application — path to an executable to be run;
• Arguments — list of parameters to pass to that executable;
• Timeout — interval to wait for target application to be launched and to get its output;
• Menu — where to put the action in the tray icon menu. Each action can be placed in its related submenu, in the root menu or hidden at all;
• Always show result — The result of performing of most of the actions is... Well, just performed action. There is no any text output I'm interested in or there is a dedicated GUI to display it. But some of actions are just requests for text info — like Show used settings or Account details. This flag is to define, should the text output be displayed on each run or not. If not set, the result would be shown only in case of error (non zero exit code or application crash).

The actual set of configurable fields depends on the action type:

• For yangl you can only change the menu anchoring; actions like Show Settings or Quit can not be hidden;
• For all NordVPN actions the Application is configured in yangl's settings;
• Extra actions are totally editable.

Simple map UI that allows to select location of the target NordVPN server. Contains a list of available groups, countries and cities — no servers. I did not find the way to get it through the CLI and I'm too lazy to grab it from the NordVPN web site.

I don't want to bother with anything related to sensitive data, so there are no tools to manage the account. Please, handle your login/password by yourself within the good old CLI :)

In some (rare) cases it's necessary to temporarry switch the VPN off to access some web resources or to run torrent, or whatever. Here are the Pause actions for this purpouse — use one of the predefined intervals or type your own one. If you have a list of such resources (e.g., a printer on your LAN or router's web interfafe) — consider adding it to the white list. There is no UI for this (yet?), see nordvpn whitelist add --help for details.

To avoid being spammed by balloon messages on reconnection you may want to switch off NordVPN's notification. Or may not. It's up to you. But it's impossible to switch off yangl's norifications, at least for now.

Its messages and tooltip (when in Connected state) provide advanced info about current connection — used server, uptime, and so on. By default that is in rich text format, but if your Desktop Environment does not support it, you can switch to the plain text:

See BUILD.md

See INSTALL.md (TBD)