Crypto marquee bar widget

A bar widget that scrolls multiple crypto prices and their daily % change, marquee-style, with a triangle that's green on the way up and red on the way down per symbol, and opens a configuration popup on click.

Preview

Demo

Dependency

Live prices come over a Binance WebSocket stream, bridged into Quickshell via websocat, since Quickshell's QML has no native WebSocket client. Install it with:

omarchy pkg add websocat

If websocat isn't on PATH, the widget stays empty and its tooltip says so instead of hanging on "Fetching…" forever. websocat is only checked once, when the plugin loads. See "Applying changes" below if you install it after the widget already came up without it.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/devbrsa/omarchy-crypto-marquee.git --enable
omarchy pkg add websocat

--enable walks you through picking a bar section (left/center/right) and adds the widget's entry to ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json for you. Install order with websocat doesn't matter, but see "Applying changes" below if the widget already loaded once without it.

To install manually instead, clone this repo into ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/io.github.devbrsa.crypto-marquee/, then add an entry with "id": "io.github.devbrsa.crypto-marquee" under bar.layout in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json yourself (see Configuration below).

Uninstall

omarchy plugin remove io.github.devbrsa.crypto-marquee

This removes the widget from the bar (if enabled) and deletes the plugin folder, backed up alongside the other plugins first unless it's a git-managed clone (e.g. via omarchy plugin add).

How it works

A single persistent websocat process, started once at load and auto-restarted with exponential backoff if it exits (dropped connections, network blips, and so on), subscribes to Binance's combined @trade WebSocket stream for every configured symbol at once (wss://stream.binance.com:9443/stream?streams=<symbol>@trade/...). Each incoming line is the latest traded price for one symbol, applied to tickers instantly. That's the live part.
Separately, every refreshIntervalSec (default 5 minutes), a sequential curl loop hits GET /api/v3/klines?symbol=<symbol>&interval=1d&limit=1 once per configured symbol to (re)fetch each symbol's current UTC daily-open baseline. % change = (lastTradePrice - dayOpen) / dayOpen is recomputed locally whenever either input updates.
This matches what Binance's own UI shows: change since the 00:00 UTC daily open, not the rolling 24h figure from /api/v3/ticker/24hr. Those two numbers disagree by design (rolling window vs. fixed daily window). Binance's kline WebSocket stream would give the daily-open baseline directly and skip the REST poll entirely, but it proved unreliable and throttled in practice, unlike @trade, which pushes instantly, so the REST poll handles that half instead.
The bar renders a continuous marquee: all configured symbols' <symbol> <triangle> <price> / <percent> segments (e.g. BTCUSDT ▲ $63,103 / +0.09%) scroll right-to-left in an endless loop, clipped to a fixed-width viewport, at the bar's own text size (Style.font.body, not independently configurable). Prices are dollar-prefixed, and decimals scale with magnitude (0 for ≥100, down to 8 for sub-$0.0001 prices), so a low-priced altcoin (e.g. JASMYUSDT ▲ $0.004560 / +1.20%) shows its actual value instead of rounding to $0.00. ▲ (up) and ▼ (down) render at full glyph width in every font, unlike the diagonal ↗/↘ arrows originally used, which render narrow and half-width in most fonts. Each segment is two independently colored Text items: the symbol name always uses bar.barForeground, the same theme text token every other bar widget's label uses, regardless of direction. Only the price/percent segment carries the up/down color. Those colors are their own settings rather than the theme's accent/urgent tokens (some themes' "urgent" color reads closer to olive than red, and a pastel green tuned for dark surfaces loses contrast on light ones), with one pair of colors per theme brightness: colorPositiveDark and colorNegativeDark on dark themes, colorPositiveLight and colorNegativeLight on light themes, chosen via a Color.background luminance check (see Configuration below). The scroll is the standard seamless-marquee trick: the segment row is duplicated back-to-back and animated by exactly one copy-width, so the loop reset is invisible.
Hovering shows a tooltip listing every symbol's price/percent, plus a single "last updated" time (the most recent fetch, rendered in the configured timezone).
Left-clicking opens a popup (Panel.qml, the same Loader/panel pattern every other Omarchy bar widget uses) to edit the tracked symbol list. A search field filters Binance's own tradeable symbol list, fetched once from GET /api/v3/ticker/price (about 2500 symbols, no auth, cached in memory for the panel's lifetime), as you type. Only real Binance symbol names ever get added, picked with the arrow keys and Enter or a click, never whatever you happened to type, so a typo can't silently produce a symbol that never resolves. Each added symbol becomes its own row with an "✕" to remove it. Nothing is saved until you click Save (Escape or clicking outside discards the edit entirely); on save, the new list is written back to this widget's shell.json entry and the marquee updates immediately (see symbols in Configuration below). The same popup also has speed and width sliders (PanelSlider, the same component Omarchy's own brightness/volume sliders use), separate from the symbol list: each applies and writes back to shell.json the moment you release it, independent of the Save button, which only ever commits the symbol list.

Configuration

Set in this widget's entry under bar.layout.right in ~/.config/omarchy/shell.json:

{
  "id": "io.github.devbrsa.crypto-marquee",
  "symbols": ["BTCUSDT", "ETHUSDT"],
  "timezone": "GMT",
  "viewportWidth": 170,
  "scrollSpeedPxPerSec": 30,
  "refreshIntervalSec": 300,
  "reconnectBaseMs": 2000,
  "reconnectMaxMs": 60000,
  "colorPositiveDark": "#a6e3a1",
  "colorNegativeDark": "#e74c3c",
  "colorPositiveLight": "#1b5e20",
  "colorNegativeLight": "#c0392b"
}

symbols is the whole point of the widget: which coins you're tracking. It's a list rather than a single value because the widget scrolls through any number of them in one marquee. Any array of Binance spot symbol pairs works. It's easiest to edit by left-clicking the widget and using the search popup (see "How it works" above) rather than hand-editing this array, though both work identically; the popup just writes here for you. Any number of symbols works; more symbols just make one lap of the marquee longer. A newly added symbol shows … for a few seconds after saving, since it needs both its first WebSocket trade and its daily-open REST fetch to land before a price/percent can be computed. Defaults to ["BTCUSDT", "ETHUSDT"].
timezone labels the tooltip's "last updated" time, since a bare time like 14:32 is ambiguous without a zone attached. Only "GMT"/"UTC" is currently supported, since that's all that was needed (Binance's daily-open boundary is itself UTC-based; see "How it works" above). Anything else falls back to the same UTC rendering rather than guessing an offset. Defaults to "GMT".
viewportWidth sets the fixed pixel width of the visible scrolling area (the popup's WIDTH slider, 80-400px, writes here on release). The bar has limited horizontal space shared with every other widget, so the marquee needs a fixed, predictable width rather than expanding to fit its variable, scrolling content. Defaults to 150; widened here to 170 to fit the symbol name prefix.
scrollSpeedPxPerSec sets the marquee scroll speed in pixels per second (the popup's SPEED slider, 10-200px/s, writes here on release). Readability is a personal tradeoff between glancing quickly and reading every digit, so this is tunable rather than hardcoded. Defaults to 90 (fast) when unset; slowed here to 30 for easier reading.
refreshIntervalSec sets how often, in seconds, the daily-open baseline is re-fetched via REST. That baseline only changes once every 24 hours at UTC midnight, so polling it as often as prices update would waste REST calls for no benefit; this setting trades off noticing the new day's open promptly against making fewer calls. Defaults to 300 (5 minutes). It only affects how quickly the widget notices a new UTC day's open; live price updates are unaffected, since those come from the WebSocket stream continuously, not this poll.
reconnectBaseMs and reconnectMaxMs bound the exponential backoff, in milliseconds, used when reconnecting the WebSocket after a drop. The connection will occasionally drop from network blips or Binance-side disconnects; without backoff, a broken connection would either hammer Binance with instant reconnect attempts or leave the widget stuck. Base is the first retry delay; Max caps how long any single retry ever waits, no matter how many consecutive failures there've been. Default to 2000 and 60000; rarely worth changing.
colorPositiveDark/colorNegativeDark and colorPositiveLight/colorNegativeLight are the up/down color pairs, one per theme brightness. A single hardcoded pair doesn't work well across themes: a pastel green tuned for dark surfaces loses contrast on light ones, and some themes' own "urgent" (red) accent reads closer to olive than red. So the widget picks one of the two pairs itself, via a Color.background luminance check, rather than relying on theme tokens, and exposes both as settings so you can retune them without editing code. Dark colors apply when the active theme is dark, Light colors when it's light; Positive/Negative map to price up/down. Default to #a6e3a1 (green) and #e74c3c (red) for dark themes, #1b5e20 (dark green) and #c0392b (red) for light themes; the light pair uses darker shades specifically for contrast against light surfaces.

Applying changes

Any setting above, edited in shell.json (including symbols), applies live on save with no restart needed. Changing symbols specifically clears cached prices and reconnects the WebSocket stream with the new subscription list within a second or two; this was verified by editing the list and watching the websocat process command change without touching anything else.

Editing this plugin's own .qml files (Widget.qml, Panel.qml) also hot-reloads automatically. Omarchy's shell watches everything under ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/ and reloads on save; you'll see "Local plugin changed, reloading" in the shell's log.

Installing websocat after the widget already loaded without it needs a plugin reload to be noticed, since the check only runs once, at plugin load: touch or save any file in the plugin folder, run omarchy-shell shell rescanPlugins, or run omarchy restart shell.

Editing manifest.json (id, version, entry points, and so on) isn't guaranteed to be picked up by the same file-watch hot-reload as .qml changes; run omarchy-shell shell rescanPlugins or omarchy restart shell after changing it.