crypto-terminal

A free, Bloomberg-style crypto terminal that runs in your shell. Live spot prices stream straight from the Coinbase Exchange public websocket: no API key, no account, no polling. Candlestick charts with a live last bar, a live order book and trade tape, the same pair on Kraken, Binance, Bybit and OKX, indicators, search across every Coinbase pair, and alerts for fast moves, wide spreads, big orders and volume spikes that can run in the background and push to your phone.

Install

Requires Python 3.10+.

pipx install crypto-terminal
crypto-terminal

Or pip install crypto-terminal into any virtualenv.

Features

• Live watchlist: last price, 24h change, and a sparkline of recent ticks. Prices flash green/red on every up/down tick.

• Candlestick chart for the highlighted pair, with volume underneath. Six timeframes (1m to 1d candles) in a strip above the chart, three zoom levels, and f to switch between split, chart-only and watchlist-only views. The last candle follows the live price and a new one opens at each candle boundary. Wick tips (highs and lows) are drawn to half a character row and bodies are solid whole rows, so candles never break in any terminal; the highest high and lowest low fill the panel exactly, and each axis label is the exact price of its grid line. Missing candles leave a gap rather than squashing time. A dashed line and tag mark the last price.

• Order book for the highlighted pair: the best bids and asks with size and a depth bar (cumulative size from the best price out), and the real spread in price and basis points. Prices are grouped so walls are visible: each pair opens at the step nearest 1 basis point of its price ($10 for BTC at ~$82k), and g cycles coarser up to 0.5% of the price, then back to ungrouped. Grouped asks round up and bids round down, so a level never shows a better price than is really on offer. A size too small for the column reads <0.0001, never 0. If the connection drops or goes quiet, the book is hidden (not shown stale) until a fresh snapshot arrives.

• Trade tape: every trade as it prints, green when the buyer crossed the spread, red when the seller did. A bar on top shows the share of the last minute's volume that was bought. Trades in the same second, side and price are combined into one line with a count (×3); lines bigger than 98% of recent ones are highlighted. Trade ids are sequential, so a trade that never arrived shows as 1 missed instead of silently vanishing. b hides or shows the book and tape; on terminals narrower than 140 columns they start hidden.

• Other exchanges (x): the highlighted pair's best bid and ask on Kraken, Binance, Bybit and OKX next to Coinbase, and how far each one's mid price sits from Coinbase's, in basis points. This is the view no exchange's own screen gives you: where the pair is cheaper or dearer right now, and whether Coinbase buyers are paying a premium. Binance, Bybit and OKX price USD pairs in USDT (marked ₮), a stablecoin that drifts a little above or below $1. Their prices are converted to USD at Coinbase's live USDT-USD price before comparing, and the rate is shown; compared directly, a 0.1% USDT drift would show as a 10 bp premium that isn't there. Until the rate arrives, those rows show prices but no comparison. A pair an exchange doesn't list says not listed. A dropped connection shows its status, never its last prices. Connections open only while the panel is showing, for the highlighted pair only.

• Indicators: SMA 20, EMA 50 and VWAP (resets at the UTC day) over the candles, RSI 14 in its own panel.

• Coin search: add solana lists every online Solana pair (USD, USDC, USDT, EUR, GBP and BTC quotes first). Exact pairs like add SOL-BTC add directly. Sub-cent and BTC-quoted prices keep 5 significant figures.

• Alerts: on a price level or a percentage move (these fire once), or watch alerts that stay armed:

  • fast move: move 2% 15m fires when the price is 2% above the lowest or below the highest of the last 15 minutes.
  • wide spread: spread 5bp fires when the gap between the best bid and ask passes 5 basis points of the price (liquidity drying up).
  • big order: print 500k fires when one taker order is worth 500,000 or more in the quote currency. Its fills are added up, so a sweep through many price levels counts as the one order it was, and fires once.
  • volume spike: volume 3x fires when the last minute traded 3x the average minute of the 15 before. It needs 16 minutes of unbroken trades first; if a trade is missed (trade ids are sequential), it starts counting again rather than compare against a baseline that's too low.

  Watch alerts fire when their condition becomes true (not on every tick while it stays true), at most once a minute each; anything held back is counted in the next message. An alert rings the terminal bell, shows a toast, sends a desktop notification (macOS, or Linux with notify-send) and, if set up, a push to your phone. Pairs with an alert carry a 🔔.

• Status line: connection state, time since the last tick, UTC clock. Shows STALE after 10s without data and reconnects automatically with exponential backoff.

Default pairs: BTC-USD, ETH-USD, XRP-USD, SOL-USD, ADA-USD.

How live is it?

Measured on the five default pairs over 60s:

The order book adds one connection for the highlighted pair only: a ~1.1 MB snapshot when you select BTC-USD, then ~18 updates/s at ~0.03 Mbps (measured over 60s on a Friday night). It opens 0.3s after the selection settles, so scrolling through the watchlist doesn't download a book for every pair, and it closes while the book is hidden.

Coinbase pushes an update on every trade (bursts are batched); nothing is polled. A heartbeat arrives every second, so a dead connection is spotted and replaced within seconds. The chart redraws at most four times a second.

Keys

Commands

Price and one-shot move alerts fire once and are then removed; watch alerts (marked ↻ in alerts) stay until you remove them. The watchlist, indicators, alerts and push setting are saved in ~/.config/crypto-terminal/ (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/crypto-terminal/).

Alerts in the background

crypto-terminal watch

Checks your alerts with no screen: on a laptop left open, or a small server. It reads the same alerts as the terminal and picks up changes within seconds, so set alerts in the terminal and let watch look after them. While it runs, the terminal shows alerts checked by watch and leaves the checking to it, so nothing fires twice. It connects only for the pairs that have alerts (and streams trades only for big-order and volume alerts).

Each alert prints one line to stdout, so crypto-terminal watch >> ~/crypto-alerts.log keeps a history. Ctrl-C or kill stops it cleanly.

Push to your phone: install the free ntfy app, subscribe to a topic, then run push <topic> in the terminal (it sends a test). Anyone who knows a topic name on ntfy.sh can read it, so pick a long random one (push crypto-7f3k9q2m), or run your own server: push https://ntfy.example.com/alerts.

From source

git clone https://github.com/owen-alderson/crypto-terminal.git
cd crypto-terminal
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python -m crypto_terminal

Architecture

crypto_terminal/
  feed.py        websocket client: subscribes to ticker + heartbeat, validates each message,
                 reconnects with exponential backoff (1s → 30s); 30s of silence = dead socket
  history.py     REST: candles, the product list for search, the live-candle update
  indicators.py  SMA, EMA, RSI, VWAP as pure functions
  alerts.py      alert rules, the watcher (windows, cooldowns, warm-up), desktop + ntfy notifications
  watch.py       `crypto-terminal watch`: alerts with no screen
  venues.py      Kraken, Binance, Bybit, OKX best bid/ask feeds; USDT → USD conversion
  chart.py       the chart as a pure function: candles in, text lines out; wick tips exact to half a row, solid whole-row bodies
  theme.py       the colour palette
  widgets.py     PriceTable (watchlist), ChartPane (draws chart.py's lines), PairPicker (search results)
  app.py         Textual app: layout, command parsing, saved config, status line
tests/           pytest: parsing, indicators against reference values, search, alerts, reconnect
                 against a local websocket server, headless UI tests with Textual's Pilot (no internet)

The feed, the chart fetch and the product list run as Textual async workers. Changing the watchlist restarts the feed worker, and a new chart request cancels the previous one so a slow response can't draw the wrong pair.

Tests

pytest

History

This repo started as a Streamlit + CoinGecko portfolio dashboard that polled every 60s. That version is preserved at the v1-streamlit tag (git checkout v1-streamlit).

License

MIT, see LICENSE. Provided as is, with no warranty: this is a market-data viewer, not financial advice.