◆ polytui

Polymarket, but it lives in your terminal.

Browse live prediction markets, watch the odds spring around in animated probability bars, pull up a price chart and the live order book, and keep a watchlist of the markets you care about — all without ever leaving your shell.

It's built with Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss and Harmonica (the spring physics behind the bars), and styled in that clean Charm look — a connected tab bar, pink/purple accents, glossy gradient bars, braille charts. No clutter.

One thing up front: it's read-only. It pulls straight from Polymarket's public APIs, so there's no login, no API key, and nothing to configure. You also can't place trades from it — it's for watching, not betting.

Getting started

You'll need Go 1.21 or newer and a terminal that does 256/truecolor (most modern ones do). A wider window is nicer — at ~96 columns the detail view opens up into two side-by-side panes.

Grab it and run:

git clone https://github.com/shubhxho/polytui.git
cd polytui
go run .

Prefer a real binary you can drop on your $PATH? Build one:

go build -o polytui .
./polytui

That's the whole setup. No flags, no config files, no env vars to fiddle with — just launch it. Hit q (or ctrl+c) whenever you want out.

Getting around

There are three screens, and you move between them the obvious way: enter (or l) goes deeper, esc backs out.

The splash is just a quick animated logo on launch — mash any key to skip it.

Browse is home base. Up top is a row of category tabs:

Trending · Politics · Sports · Crypto · World · Tech · Culture · ★ Watch

Flip between them with tab / shift+tab (or ← / →). Below sits the list of markets for that tab, and it loads more as you scroll toward the bottom. Move around with the arrow keys or j/k, jump to the ends with g/G, and the mouse wheel works too.

A few things you'll reach for a lot here:

• s / S cycles how the list is sorted — 24h Volume → Total Volume → Liquidity → Ending Soon → Newest → Competitive.
• / searches every active market. Type, enter to run, esc to back out.
• w stars whatever's selected and drops it in your Watch tab.
• enter / l opens a market up.

Detail is where a single market gets the full treatment:

• Every outcome gets its own probability bar that springs to value (and eases over when things move). Green means it's the favourite, pink the underdog. Use j/k to pick an outcome — the chart and order book follow along.
• The price chart is a braille line of that outcome's odds over time, green when it's climbing and pink when it's falling. Swap the time range with t / T (6H → 1D → 1W → 1M → ALL), and if you've got a mouse, hover the chart for a crosshair showing the exact date and price.
• The order book shows live bids and asks as a depth ladder mirrored around the spread — best prices in the middle, sizes fanning outward.
• d expands the market's full description, w stars it, esc takes you back.

Everything refreshes on its own every 15 seconds, and r forces it any time.

The keys, all in one place

If you'd rather just have the cheat sheet (? brings this up in-app too):

Anywhere

Key	Does
?	toggle the help overlay
r	refresh what you're looking at
q / ctrl+c	quit

Browse

Key	Does
↑/k · ↓/j	move the selection
tab / shift+tab · ← / →	switch category tab
g / G (home / end)	jump to top / bottom
ctrl+u / ctrl+d (pgup / pgdn)	page up / down
mouse wheel	scroll the list
s / S	cycle sort order
/	search markets
w	star / unstar
enter / l	open a market

Detail

Key	Does
↑/k · ↓/j	pick an outcome
t / T	change the chart range
d	show / hide the description
w	star / unstar
hover the chart	crosshair with date + price
esc (h / ← / backspace)	back to the list

Your watchlist sticks around

Star a market with w and it shows up under ★ Watch. That list is saved to disk, so it's still there next time you open the app — and each starred market gets re-fetched fresh on launch. It lives at:

# macOS:  ~/Library/Application Support/polytui/watchlist.json
# Linux:  ~/.config/polytui/watchlist.json   (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/polytui/)

Want a market gone? Just press w on it again to toggle the star off — works from the list or the detail screen.

Under the hood

main.go                 program entry
internal/api/           the Polymarket Gamma + CLOB client and types
internal/ui/            the Bubble Tea model, views, components, animations

If you want to poke at it:

go test ./...            # unit + render tests, no network needed
NET=1 go test ./...      # also hits the live API
DUMP=1 go test ./internal/ui -run TestRender   # dump rendered screens to stdout

The TUI needs a real terminal, so for non-interactive checks it's easiest to drive the model with messages (see internal/ui/render_test.go) instead of launching the whole thing.