plasma-bitcoin-price

Style	Description
Plain text	Trend-colored text (green/red/grey)
Split-flap board	Airport board: white characters on black flaps, cascading flip animation on price changes, trend LED
Nixie tubes	Retro amber glowing digits in glass tubes (with a soft flicker), trend LED

In the split-flap and nixie styles the digits keep their display color and the trend (up/down/unchanged) is shown on a small LED next to the display.

Situation	Plain text color	Trend LED
Price up	green	green
Price down	red	red
Price unchanged / first reading	grey	grey
API failure (network error, 4xx/5xx, rate limit 429)	`--`	grey

Format: 68,969 € (thousands separators follow the system locale, rounded to whole euros) preceded by the bundled Bitcoin icon in the compact and full representations.

Configuration

Refresh interval (minutes) — default 5, minimum 5, maximum 1440. The 5-minute floor exists because the CoinGecko API allows one request per 5 minutes. A hint text in the config dialog explains this.

Configurable via right-click on the widget → Configure Bitcoin Price… → General.

Installation

Graphical

Double-click bitcoin-price-1.2.0.plasmoid in Dolphin (Plasma installs it to ~/.local/share/plasma/plasmoids/ automatically). The latest build is attached to the v1.2.0 release.

Terminal

kpackagetool5 --type Plasma/Applet --upgrade bitcoin-price-1.2.0.plasmoid
# Then restart the shell if needed:
plasmashell --replace &

Upgrading an already-installed widget requires --upgrade (--install fails when the plugin id already exists).

Uninstall:

kpackagetool5 --type Plasma/Applet --remove nl.a14r.bitcoinprice

Notes

The API URL uses vs_currencies=eur. The original request referenced a usd URL, but the requirement was "price versus the euro" with a €-sign; showing a dollar amount under a € sign would be wrong.
The trend comparison is made against the last known price. After an API failure that reference is kept, so the color is correct again as soon as fresh data arrives.
Without a CoinGecko API key the API may occasionally return 429; the widget shows -- until the next successful poll.
Tested on Plasma 5.27 / Qt 5.15. Plasma 6 is expected to work but is untested.

Debugging

The widget logs to the plasmashell journal:

journalctl --user -u plasma-plasmashell.service | grep bitcoinprice

Expected lines: started, refresh interval: N minutes, fetched EUR <price>, or fetch failed, HTTP status: <code>.

Repository layout

metadata.desktop
contents/
├── config/
│   ├── main.xml            # config schema (refreshMinutes, min 5, max 1440)
│   └── config.qml          # config dialog registry (ConfigModel/ConfigCategory)
├── images/bitcoin.svg      # bundled Bitcoin icon
└── ui/
    ├── main.qml             # widget + fetch/compare logic
    └── configGeneral.qml    # interval setting page

Repackage yourself:

zip -r bitcoin-price.plasmoid metadata.desktop contents

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

README.md

Bitcoin Price (Plasma 5 widget)

Display styles