Massive.com — Ticker Wall

The Massive.com ticker wall is an open source, cross-platform, horizontally scalable scrolling stock ticker tape. It spans any number of side-by-side displays (on one machine or many) to form a single continuous tape, so you can build a large ticker wall out of commodity screens instead of specialty hardware. It runs on macOS and Linux. All interaction is via the CLI, with a gRPC interface underneath for advanced integrations.

We use it at the Massive.com office, and it's configurable enough to suit a broad range of setups.

This is a Rust application (a Cargo workspace under crates/). It replaces the original Go implementation; see docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the design and docs/legacy/ARCHITECTURE.md for the retired Go version.

Features

• One shared, continuous scrolling tape across N screens, updating live.
• Full-bleed intraday price graph behind every ticker (green/red by direction).
• A second top gainers/losers tape pinned to the bottom, on its own speed.
• Full-screen announcements with eased slide-in/out animations.
• Live control of colors, speeds, and layout over gRPC — no restart needed.
• Optional on-screen FPS meter for performance checks.

Getting Started

There are two roles in a cluster: 1 leader and N GUIs. The leader can run on the same machine as a GUI, and there's no minimum number of GUIs — start with one screen and add more; the tape re-layouts in real time.

Download the latest binary from the Releases page, or build from source (below).

Start the leader (pulls data, serves gRPC on :6886):

tickerwall server -a <MASSIVE_API_KEY>      # or set TW_API_KEY

Run a GUI (each is one screen/window):

tickerwall gui --screen-index 10
tickerwall gui --screen-index 20            # a second screen, to its right

Configuration

Configuration resolves as CLI flags > environment variables > built-in defaults. Environment variables are the flag name uppercased with a TW_ prefix — e.g. --api-key → TW_API_KEY, --scroll-speed → TW_SCROLL_SPEED, --ticker-box-width → TW_TICKER_BOX_WIDTH.

Run tickerwall <subcommand> --help for the full flag list.

Updating settings

Update cluster attributes in real time (only the flags you pass change):

tickerwall update --scroll-speed 5
tickerwall update --bg-color 255,255,255,255
tickerwall update --movers-scroll-speed 8        # the bottom tape's own speed
tickerwall update --show-fps true                # toggle the FPS meter

Making announcements

tickerwall announce "Big Announcement!"
tickerwall announce "Big Success!" --animation ease --type success

Describe a cluster

tickerwall describe

Prints the current settings, connected screens, tickers, and top movers.

Building from source

cargo build --release        # produces target/release/tickerwall

protoc is not required — the protobuf compiler is vendored via protoc-bin-vendored and used automatically at build time.

Linux needs X11 + OpenGL dev headers for the GUI:

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install -y libgl1-mesa-dev xorg-dev

macOS needs no extra packages. Windows is untested.

Development

A justfile provides shortcuts (brew install just):

just build      # cargo build
just test       # cargo test --workspace
just lint       # cargo fmt --check + clippy -D warnings
just server     # run the leader (needs TW_API_KEY)
just gui        # run one GUI screen
just run        # leader + two GUI screens

CI (GitHub Actions) builds, tests, lints (fmt + clippy) on Linux and macOS, and publishes release binaries for x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu and aarch64-apple-darwin on version tags (v*).

Deployment

The deployed screens boot straight into the GUI fullscreen with no window manager (bare X). See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the kiosk setup.

TODO / Wish list

• Config-file layer (tickerwall.{yml,json,toml}) — currently flags + env only.
• Run inside a Docker container.
• v2.0 — replace the explicit leader with Raft-based election among the GUIs.