I've been trying to use wicd-curses to manage and connect to wireless networks and have had some problems. First, when I try to use right arrow to set the passphrase, it crashes and gives a python traceback and says something about "None is not in list".
I tried installing with the gtk USE flag, and wicd-gtk seems to generally work as one would expect, except for randomly dropping connections right after obtaining an IP address. I went back to wicd-curses and can now config the networks, but when I push C to connect, it crashes and gives another python traceback saying that "list index out of range".
A little persistence with wicd-gtk has me online at least, but I would think dealbreaker bugs with clear error messages indicating common programming errors on a very vanilla setup like mine would be fixed promptly (see https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/43850 and https://bugs.launchpad.net/wicd/+bug/1432423 ). Did the developers abandon wicd-curses? I really love this program because I don't have to type a bunch of wpa_supplicant commands or install big-n-heavy stuff on my old laptop to stay mobile.
(What a great package manager we have, can I get an amen?) Things seem to be working now. If anybody has a cleaner solution, I'm all ears.