Real-time financial data is often locked behind bulky GUIs or web dashboards. What if you want a lightweight, terminal-based tool that streams live stock quotes and charts? tickrs answers this by combining Rust’s performance with a terminal UI powered by tui-rs, delivering second-by-second market updates right in your console.
What tickrs offers and its architecture
tickrs is a terminal real-time stock ticker and charting application written in Rust. It fetches live market data directly from Yahoo Finance, so no external database or paid API is needed. The app presents data visually via three chart types: line charts, candlestick charts, and kagi charts — each capable of displaying different perspectives of stock price movement.
The supported time ranges span from intraday (1 day) up to 5 years, letting users analyze both short-term and longer-term trends. tickrs refreshes data every second by default, maintaining a live feel suitable for active monitoring.
Under the hood, tickrs uses the tui-rs library to render its user interface in the terminal. tui-rs is a Rust library designed for building rich terminal UIs with widgets and layout management. This foundation allows tickrs to present multiple charts, labels, and data tables cleanly within a terminal window.
The project draws inspiration from ytop, a system monitoring TUI tool, adapting its interactive and customizable UI approach to the financial domain. Users can tailor what they see via a rich set of CLI options — for example, toggling pre-market and after-hours data, enabling volume bars, or adjusting x-axis labels.
While primarily targeting Unix-like terminals, Windows users are advised to run tickrs inside Windows Terminal to get proper Unicode and UI rendering.
Technical strengths and design tradeoffs
The standout technical strength of tickrs lies in its efficient use of Rust paired with tui-rs to deliver a responsive and visually rich terminal dashboard with minimal resource overhead. Compared to many GUI-based stock apps, tickrs runs lightweight and fast.
The codebase is surprisingly clean, focusing on modularity and leveraging Rust’s async features to handle the periodic data fetch without blocking the UI thread. This concurrency model ensures the UI remains responsive even during network delays.
Supporting three chart types — line, candlestick, and kagi — is a notable feature, as it offers users a choice between conventional price trends, detailed price action with open/high/low/close data, and the less common but insightful kagi chart that highlights price reversals and trends.
The range of time frames (from 1 day to 5 years) covers a broad spectrum of use cases, from day traders to longer-term investors. The default one-second refresh interval provides a live experience but could be adjusted if bandwidth or rate limits are concerns.
The CLI interface is extensive, allowing users to customize the display heavily. This includes toggling volume indicators, choosing which data to include (e.g., pre/post-market), and labeling options. This level of configurability is helpful for power users who want a tailored monitoring setup.
As for tradeoffs, tickrs depends on Yahoo Finance as a data source, which while free and accessible, is not guaranteed to have enterprise-grade availability or latency. Users needing guaranteed uptime or low-latency feeds may hit limits here.
The Windows Terminal requirement for Windows users is another practical caveat, since native Windows consoles often struggle with the Unicode characters and drawing required by tui-rs.
Overall, tickrs balances powerful real-time features with simplicity in deployment and use, though it is not designed to replace professional trading platforms or handle order execution.
Quick start
Binary
Download the latest release for your platform
Cargo
cargo install tickrs
Arch Linux
pacman -S tickrs
Homebrew
brew tap tarkah/tickrs
brew install tickrs
verdict
tickrs is a practical tool for developers and traders who prefer working in terminal environments and want a lightweight, visually rich stock ticker that updates live. Its Rust foundation provides performance and reliability, while tui-rs enables a surprisingly capable UI for a terminal app.
It’s well-suited for those who monitor markets casually or as a complement to more comprehensive trading setups. The support for multiple chart types and time ranges gives it flexibility beyond simple tickers.
That said, reliance on Yahoo Finance means it’s not a fit for mission-critical trading operations requiring high availability or low latency. Windows users must ensure they use Windows Terminal to avoid UI glitches.
For anyone who spends significant time in terminals and values rapid, live stock insights without launching a browser or heavy app, tickrs is worth exploring. The installation options cover most platforms, and the CLI customization provides good developer experience.
Overall, tickrs is a solid example of what Rust and terminal UIs can deliver in the financial domain — straightforward, efficient, and customizable, with tradeoffs clearly aligned to its lightweight terminal-first philosophy.
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→ GitHub Repo: tarkah/tickrs ⭐ 1,621 · Rust