cryptobar

Crypto prices in your bar, your terminal and your desktop.
No API key, no daemon, no network dependency just to show up.

  

BTC 66 040 € ▁▁▁▂▂▃▅█ +6.0 %

The four surfaces

Bar	One cryptocurrency at a time, curve included, scroll to move to the next. Quickshell draws a real curve; Waybar shows a Unicode sparkline.
Panel	Every watched cryptocurrency, aligned, with the 1 h / 24 h / 7 d changes and the active row highlighted.
Terminal	cryptobar chart — full-resolution braille curve, sized to the actual terminal.
Window	cryptobar popup — GTK4: search, curve over five ranges, watched cryptocurrencies, portfolio, alerts and settings, all editable without opening the configuration file.

BITCOIN  66 346 €   +22.1 %  (7d)

66 876 € │                                                    ⢸⢧⡀  ⢀
         │                                                    ⢸ ⣇⡟⠻⠼
         │                                                  ⣤⡞⢸
         │                                                 ⢀⡇
         │                                        ⡴⣶⠒⠃
         │                                    ⢠⣄⣤⢠⣴⠃
         │                        ⣀⣀⣤⡀ ⣀ ⣀⡞⠓⠲⠴⢦⣀⡀⢀⣀⡤⠇
54 320 € │⠉⠉⠉⠛⠛⠛⠓⠒⠒⠶⠶⠤⠤⠤⠤⠤⠴⠶⠞⠛⠉⠉⠁

Installation

git clone https://github.com/Akayashuu/cryptobar
cd cryptobar
./install.sh

The script builds, installs into ~/.local/bin, writes the default configuration and drops the integration examples into ~/.config. It never touches your bar configuration: the final wiring is yours to do, and it tells you exactly what is left.

For a binary with no GTK dependency at all:

cargo install --path . --no-default-features

Wiring a bar

Quickshell

./quickshell/install.sh
qs -c ii kill && qs -c ii -d

Widget for the ii configuration of dots-hyprland, horizontal bar as well as vertical. The installer is idempotent and backs up whatever it modifies. Details, options and manual wiring: quickshell/README.md.

Waybar

In ~/.config/waybar/config.jsonc:

"custom/crypto": {
  "exec": "cryptobar bar",
  "return-type": "json",
  "interval": 30,
  "signal": 8,
  "on-click": "cryptobar popup",
  "on-click-right": "cryptobar chart --window",
  "on-click-middle": "cryptobar refresh",
  "on-scroll-up": "cryptobar next",
  "on-scroll-down": "cryptobar prev"
}

Then add "custom/crypto" to modules-right and import the style with @import "cryptobar.css";.

"signal" must match waybar_signal in the configuration: this is what makes the scroll update the bar instantly instead of waiting for the next interval.

Waybar's interval and cryptobar's refresh_interval are independent. Waybar can tick every 5 seconds without issuing a single request: the disk cache serves the data for as long as it is fresh.

Ags, Eww, and the rest

cryptobar bar --markup none produces the same line without Pango markup. On top of the already formatted text come separate fields, which Waybar ignores and which a constrained layout needs — among them coins, carrying every watched cryptocurrency with its series normalised within [0, 1], ready to plot:

{
  "text": "BTC 65 974 € ▁▁▁▂▂▃▅█ +6.4 %",
  "tooltip": "…",
  "class": "up",
  "symbol": "BTC",
  "price": "65 974 €",
  "percent": "+6.4 %",
  "sparkline": "▁▁▁▂▂▃▅█",
  "trend": "up",
  "stale": false,
  "icon": "~/.cache/cryptobar/icons/bitcoin.png",
  "glyph": "₿", "color": "#f7931a", "foreground": "#101010",
  "coins": [
    {
      "symbol": "BTC", "name": "Bitcoin", "price": "65 974 €",
      "change_1h": "+0.1 %", "change_24h": "+6.4 %", "change_7d": "+22.6 %",
      "trend": "up", "series": [0.0, 0.004, 0.011, "…"], "active": true
    }
  ],
  "alerts": [
    {
      "symbol": "BTC", "kind": "above",
      "title": "BTC above 60 000 €", "body": "Bitcoin is worth 65 974 €."
    }
  ],
  "portfolio": {
    "total": "2 481.60 €", "change_24h": "+148.90 €",
    "change_24h_pct": "+6.4 %", "positive": true,
    "positions": [
      {
        "symbol": "BTC", "quantity": "0.03412",
        "value": "2 290.64 €", "share": 0.923, "color": "#f7931a"
      }
    ]
  }
}

alerts is empty most of the time: this is what lets a bar light an indicator up without recomputing anything. portfolio is null until a watched address has a balance.

With --watch, the process stays in the foreground and re-emits a line on every interval — a subscription rather than a poll.

Configuration

~/.config/cryptobar/config.toml, created on first run:

# CoinGecko ids; look them up with `cryptobar coins <term>`.
coins = ["bitcoin", "ethereum", "solana"]

# Quote currency: eur, usd, gbp, chf, cad, jpy, btc, eth
currency = "eur"

# Price refresh interval, in seconds (minimum 15).
refresh_interval = 60

# Automatic rotation between coins, in seconds. 0 = manual scroll only.
cycle_interval = 0

# Inline sparkline in the bar.
sparkline = true
sparkline_width = 8

# Decimals: "auto" adapts to the order of magnitude, or an integer to pin them.
decimals = "auto"

# Terminal emulator opened by the right click.
terminal = "kitty"

# Real-time signal used to refresh Waybar: SIGRTMIN+<n>, 1..=30.
waybar_signal = 8

# Wallets watched read-only — PUBLIC ADDRESSES only.
[[wallets]]
chain = "bitcoin"      # bitcoin, ethereum or solana
address = "bc1q…"
label = "Ledger"

# Price alerts. The three conditions are independent and can be combined.
[[alerts]]
coin = "bitcoin"
above = 100000

[[alerts]]
coin = "ethereum"
change_pct = 5

cryptobar config check validates the file and explains what is wrong.

Commands

Command	Effect
cryptobar bar	Emits the JSON line Waybar expects
cryptobar bar --markup none	Same line, without Pango markup
cryptobar bar --watch	Stays in the foreground and re-emits on every interval
cryptobar next / prev	Changes the displayed cryptocurrency
cryptobar select <N>	Displays the cryptocurrency at index N in the configured list
cryptobar refresh	Invalidates the cache and wakes the bar up
cryptobar chart [COIN] --range 7d	Chart in the current terminal
cryptobar chart --window	Same chart, in a new terminal window
cryptobar popup	GTK4 window
cryptobar portfolio	Values the balances of the watched public addresses
cryptobar coins <term>	Searches for a CoinGecko id
cryptobar config init|path|check	Manages the configuration file

Ranges accepted by --range: 1h, 24h, 7d, 30d, 1y.

Portfolio, read-only

cryptobar can value what you hold without ever being able to touch it. You give it a public address — the one you hand out to receive funds, "Receive" in Ledger Live — and it reads the balance from the chain.

cryptobar never asks for, and never accepts, a private key or a recovery phrase. An input containing whitespace (hence a recovery phrase) or starting with xprv / yprv / zprv is rejected before anything is written: the secret never reaches the disk. A test asserts that the configuration file stays byte-for-byte identical after such an attempt.

Balances are read from public endpoints, with no API key: mempool.space for Bitcoin, ethereum-rpc.publicnode.com for Ethereum, api.mainnet-beta.solana.com for Solana. The addresses and the amounts never leave the machine — no account, no exchange, no telemetry.

$ cryptobar portfolio
BTC    0.03412  2 290.64 €  92.3 %
ETH    0.08820    190.96 €   7.7 %

TOTAL           2 481.60 €
24 h  +148.90 €  (+6.4 %)

Add an address from the window ("Watched addresses" section) or straight into the configuration file.

Price alerts

Each [[alerts]] block watches one cryptocurrency on three independent conditions that can be combined: above and below are expressed in the quote currency, change_pct as a 24 h change amplitude.

An alert stays "fired" for as long as its condition holds and re-arms as soon as it becomes false again: a price oscillating around the threshold only notifies on crossings, a price that stays above only notifies once. cryptobar bar --watch is what sends the desktop notification; the crossed alerts also appear in the JSON line and in the window.

How it stays cheap

The module runs on every tick of the bar, so it cannot afford to be heavy.

• 3 to 5 ms per tick, measured in release on a warm cache.
• No daemon — nothing runs between two ticks. The --watch mode exists but is not required.
• No async runtime — a synchronous HTTP client (ureq + rustls) is enough for one request every 60 seconds and avoids pulling in tokio.
• One request for every cryptocurrency, 7-day sparklines included.
• Advisory lock on the cache: two simultaneous ticks never turn into a duplicate request.
• Atomic writes for the cache and the state: an interruption has never left a half-written file behind.
• Graceful degradation — on a network outage the last known data is served with the stale class rather than leaving a hole in the bar. An exponential backoff (60 s → 30 min) avoids hammering the API.
• Pre-reduced series — the curve is downsampled and normalised on the binary side, rounded to three decimals: the bar only has to plot it.

On the safety side: unsafe is forbidden at compile time (unsafe_code = "forbid"), unwrap, expect, panic and direct indexing are refused by the lints, ids are validated at construction before they can reach a URL or a path, HTTP redirects are refused, response size is capped at 1 MiB, and any data coming from the network is escaped before it reaches the Pango markup.

Data source

CoinGecko, public API, no key. It rate-limits at around 10 to 30 requests per minute depending on the load; the minimum refresh_interval of 15 seconds and the cache keep usage far below that limit.

Development

cargo test --all-features
cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings

The tests never touch the network: CRYPTOBAR_API_BASE redirects the client and the end-to-end tests pre-fill the cache. CRYPTOBAR_CONFIG_DIR, CRYPTOBAR_CACHE_DIR and CRYPTOBAR_RUNTIME_DIR isolate the XDG paths.

License

MIT.