I love to spend time in the terminal and since I only have one screen I wanted to have the MtGox ticker data displayed. I switched from using Screen to using Tmux and have come up with a quick way to put the ticker data in the status bar.

Check it out:




In case anyone else wants to do this, here is how it is accomplished. You only need to install one Perl module, WebService::MtGox.




How to add a neat-o MTGox ticker to your Tmux status bar:

Write the following script to ~/getMtgox, replace the shebang path to the perl binary if you need to.


#!/usr/bin/perl
# Returns MTGox ticker output to shell

use warnings;
use strict;
use WebService::MtGox;

my $m = WebService::MtGox->new;
my $t = $m->get_ticker;

my $last = $t->{ticker}->{last};
my $vol = $t->{ticker}->{vol};
my $high = $t->{ticker}->{high};
my $low = $t->{ticker}->{low};
my $buy = $t->{ticker}->{buy};
my $sell = $t->{ticker}->{sell};
my $spread = $buy > $sell ? $buy - $sell : $sell - $buy;
my $pspread = sprintf("%0.5f", $spread);

print "MtGox: Last:" . $last . " :: Bid: " . $buy . " :: Ask: " . $sell . " :: Spread: " . $pspread . "  ";


## End of script


Run these commands:

tee -a ~/.tmux.conf <<EOF
set -g status-fg green
set -g status-bg black
set -g status-attr bright
set-window-option -g window-status-current-bg green
set-window-option -g window-status-current-fg black
set-window-option -g window-status-current-attr dim
set -g status-right '#[fg=cyan,bright]#(perl ~/getMtgox)'
set -g status-right-length 75
EOF


Now install the perl module. You may or may not use sudo, Ubuntu does:

sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install WebService::MtGox'

Sometimes the perl package installation process can take awhile. You don't need to install all of the test modules if you don't want to. It does speed things up for future module installations though.



You can change the getMtgox output fairly easily. I've also modified the default tmux color scheme because I found the green background hard to read properly.

By default the refresh time is 15 seconds. You can change this by setting a variable in .tmux.conf:

set status-interval 15


Cheers everyone. I hope someone finds it useful. I really love tmux. The code is supposed to be much nicer than screen and they've maintained some compatibility, at least in some of the keybindings.