How to enable Bluetooth in Mac with shortcut or command line?

Question

I accidentally disabled the Bluetooth on my Mac OS. I can't enable it because my Bluetooth based keyboard and mouse is disabled. I found USB based keyboard I can use, so how can I enable Bluetooth just using my keyboard. Is there a command line or shortcut I can use?

thank you for the help

Answer 1

1. ⌘Tab until you get to the Finder.
2. ⇧⌘G to bring up the Go To dialog: type in "/Applications" without the quotes.
3. Just type the letters "sys" and your highlight should be over "System Preferences". Press ⌘O to open it.
4. In System Preferences, the cursor should be in the search field. Just type in "bluetooth" and press Return. Now you're in the Bluetooth preferences.
5. Press Tab, and there should be a faint highlight on the "On" checkbox.
6. Press spacebar, and that should turn it on.

If you happen to have Quicksilver installed, invoke System Preferences from there and go directly to step 4 above. Or without Quicksilver press ⌘Space to activate Spotlight, type "bluetooth" and go directly to the Bluetooth preference pane, and step 5 above.

If you don't have a Command key on the keyboard, then hit Ctrl-F2 to activate the Apple menu, press Down and go to System Preferences and continue at step 4 above.

If in Step 5 pressing Tab does not navigate through all inputs, then press Ctrl-F7 to activate Full Keyboard Access. When done, press Ctrl-F7 again to disable it.

Answer 2

Here's a sequence that worked for me (OS X 10.6.7) when I had the same issue.

1. Press ⌘ Space to activate Spotlight.

2. Type "bluetooth", choose the 'Bluetooth File Exchange' application, and press Return.

3. Bluetooth File Exchange will prompt to enable the bluetooth hardware, press Return.

4. Bluetooth is now enabled and you can quit Bluetooth File Exchange.

Answer 3

I've been using blueutil occasionally - seems to work.

Answer 4

First: press cmd & spacebar: write "bluetooth". Second: press the following combination: fn & ctrl & f7 = then a lightblue frame appears arround the activate box. Finally: press spacebar, finished! :)

Answer 5

@fideli has an awesome answer. I would accept his. However, I wanted to mention a little known feature of the OS: If you reboot and unplug the keyboard, the OS will automatically enable Bluetooth and star looking for BT keyboards and mice...

Answer 6

This method required the bluetooth menu bar status icon to show and used AppleScript GUI scripting (requires System Preferences » Universal Access » Support for assistive devices IIRC):

tell application "System Events"
    tell process "SystemUIServer"
        tell (menu bar item 1 of menu bar 1 whose description is "bluetooth")
            click
            click menu 1's second menu item
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

Call from command line using osascript:

osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell process "SystemUIServer" to tell (menu bar item 1 of menu bar 1 whose description is "bluetooth") to {click, click (menu item 2 of menu 1)}'

^{Do not edit this post. I don't care if you don't like the scroll bar. It's easier to select by triple-clicking this way.}

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Alternatively, you can launch System Preferences and click the checkbox:

tell application "System Preferences"
    set current pane to pane id "com.apple.preferences.bluetooth"
    tell application "System Events"
        tell process "System Preferences"
            click checkbox "On" of window "Bluetooth"
        end tell
    end tell
    quit
end tell

While a GUI process launches, it isn't visible except for the Dock icon.