If you're like me, then you spend all day in a terminal. I like to watch the bitcoin market when I have some downtime, too. Being an active bitcoin trader, and the bitcoin market being volatile as it is, it's a good idea to keep an eye on it to make sure you're not hemorrhaging money.

Prerequisites

• Fish Shell
• httpie
• jq

Fish shell is simply my favorite shell, which is why this protip requires it.

httpie makes curl requests super easy.

Jq processes JSON data for manipulation in a super easy way.

btc.fish

function btc --description 'show the current buy/sell price of btc based on Coinbase prices'
    http GET https://api.coinbase.com/v2/prices/buy | jq '{buy: .data.amount}'
    http GET https://api.coinbase.com/v2/prices/sell | jq '{sell: .data.amount}'
end

watch_btc.fish

function watch_btc
    while true
        btc
        sleep 600
    end
end

That's pretty much it. Just call watch_btc and every 600 seconds (10 minutes) you'll pull and display the current buy and sell price for BTC.

Preview