FOSSPicks

Ticker

Who would have thought stocks and cryptocurrency would become so exciting for the average Linux user? Rocketing prices and predictable crashes, billionaire influencers announcing their buy-ins, and system-crashing crowdfunding campaigns have been making history, and it can often be difficult to keep up with what's happening. The answer, of course, is to keep a careful eye on those values, but not – we recommend – via a website whose furniture has been designed to tempt you into buying this crazy stock. Which is why you need to install Ticker. Ticker will track all the stocks you care about from the comfort of your command line without adding any superfluous distractions from the prices themselves and how they're moving. It's also beautifully designed and implemented, with a set of command-line options that are perfectly tuned to the command-line "do one thing well" ethos.

To start the utility, for example, you execute the ticker command with the -w argument and a comma-delimited list of ticker symbols for the stocks you wish to watch, such as GME,AAPL,TSLA. These instantly appear as live stock prices pulled from Yahoo Finance, and you can also add non-real-time data from all the major global exchanges, as well as for most cryptocurrencies. There are further options to show the open price, previous close price, and that day's price range, as well as global totals for the day on the stocks you've chosen to show. Cleverly, all of this can be put into a configuration file, which can include your personal costs for the gain or loss ranges if you happen to hold stocks or want to play with virtual investments. You can also sort the range and run the request through a proxy to sidestep firewalls. Ticker provides a budding investment voyeur with everything you need to play without the temptation of buying into the game.

Project Website

https://github.com/achannarasappa/ticker

If you don't want to keep being distracted by stock price alerts, install Ticker and set its refresh interval to 30 minutes.

Storage status

vizex

Keeping with the theme of doing one command-line job well is vizex, a tool that simply tells you how much storage space is being used for every partition on your device. It's surprisingly difficult to find a tool that keeps it that simple. The closest we've come to finding a user-friendly equivalent from the standard terminal is the du disk usage command with the -hs arguments. This provides human readable output (h), such as gigabytes rather than a huge number of bytes, and a summary (s) rather than listing every file and folder on your system – although that can be useful with grep if you want individual output. Vizex does away with all of this superfluous nonsense and tells you exactly what you need to know: How much space am I using, and how much have I got left?

What's great about this little tool is that it uses simple graphics to convey this information with a filled-in bar graph for whatever partitions you have mounted. Each partition is clearly labeled in red and annotated numerically with human-readable values for the capacities involved. Finally, there's either a green, amber, or red percentage value for how much space is left. The color reflects a perceived safety range – with green meaning there's plenty of space and red meaning you'll need to free some space soon. All of this can also be configured with optional arguments for header color, style, text color, and graph color. This can help vizex integrate perfectly with your selected command-line color scheme, and you can also choose to exclude partitions (useful for snaps), display extra details such as the filesystem, and even show battery information. This makes vizex a perfect quick access tool when using high-consumption services like virtual machines on a laptop.

Project Website

https://github.com/bexxmodd/vizex

Vizex can output storage values for all the mounted partitions on your device or find the capacity for a specific path.

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