Flowsurface

An open-source native desktop charting application for crypto markets. Supports Binance, Bybit, Hyperliquid, OKX, and MEXC.

Key Features

• Multiple chart/pane types:
  • Time & Sales: Scrollable list of live trades.
  • DOM (Depth of Market) / Ladder: Displays current L2 orderbook alongside recent trade volumes on grouped price levels.
  • Heatmap (Historical DOM): Uses live trades and orderbook to display a time-series heatmap chart. Supports customizable price grouping, different time aggregations, fixed or visible range volume profile.
  • Candlestick: Includes footprints, profiles, indicators with time-based or custom tick-based intervals.
    • Order flow: Footprints with bid/ask, volume, delta, and table views; configurable price grouping, imbalance highlighting, POC and naked-POC levels, and large-trade markers.
    • Profiles: Visible-range and recurring volume profiles, plus daily, weekly, or monthly TPO profiles with value areas, initial balance, single prints, and interactive splitting and merging.
    • Scriptable indicators: Use bundled indicators, install more from the catalog, or write your own with the .ind DSL. Display overlays or separate panels, resize and reorder panels, and feed compatible indicator outputs into other indicators. See Indicators to get started.
• Real-time sound effects driven by trade streams
• *Multi window/monitor support on macOS and Linux.
• Pane linking for quickly switching tickers across multiple panes.
• Persistent layouts and customizable themes with editable color palettes.

Historical Trades on Footprint Charts:

By default, Flowsurface captures and plots live trades in real time via WebSocket.

To backfill the visible time range on footprint charts, enable trade fetching in Settings → Network, apply the settings, then restart Flowsurface. Three modes are available:

• Exchange: Fetches directly from Binance's public REST API and bulk data mirrors (data.binance.vision). Fast for daily archives; paginated and rate-limited for intraday ranges. Binance only (spot, linear, inverse).

• Server: Fetches from any HTTP server that exposes a GET /trades.arrow endpoint returning an Arrow IPC stream with:

  • Response: Content-Type: application/vnd.apache.arrow.stream

  • Schema (columns matched by name, order not significant):

    ts (int64), price (float64), qty (float64), is_sell (bool)

    Use Unix milliseconds for ts, from, and to. Quantities are in base units for spot/linear markets and quote notional for inverse markets. Return the oldest matching trades first, in ascending timestamp order.

  • Query parameters: venue, market, symbol, from (inclusive), to (inclusive), limit

  • Optional bearer-token auth: (Authorization: Bearer <token>)

  Self-signed TLS certificates are accepted. Works with all exchanges and has no exchange rate limits. Bring your own data source.

  A reference implementation is available at flowsurface-server, a self-contained collector that writes trades to DuckDB and serves them over this protocol.

• Off: Live trades only; no historical backfill.

Historical klines, open interest, and ticker metadata/stats are always fetched from exchange REST APIs.

Live trades, orderbook and kline updates are streamed from exchange WebSocket feeds.

Indicators

Candlestick/footprint charts include bundled indicators. Add more from the optional catalog or write your own .ind files; installing indicators does not require rebuilding the app.

To install, go to Settings → Open data folder and copy the desired catalog .ind files into indicators/ subfolder there. Restart the app, then add them through the chart pane's Indicators sidebar. The data directory is $FLOWSURFACE_DATA_PATH when set, otherwise your platform's data directory under flowsurface/. See installation details for path overrides and loading behavior.

From an application source checkout, you can load a separate catalog checkout:

FLOWSURFACE_INDICATORS_PATH="/path/to/indicators/sources" cargo run

To create an indicator, see the language reference and examples and the CLI workflow for scaffolding, checking, and testing sources.

Installation

Method 1: Prebuilt Binaries

Downloads are available on the Releases page.

• macOS: Open the universal DMG and drag Flowsurface into Applications. Supports Apple Silicon and Intel Macs running macOS 11 or newer.
• Windows: Run the x64 MSIX to install for your current user, then launch Flowsurface from the Start menu. No administrator approval is required.
• Linux: Extract the archive and run ./install.sh without sudo, then launch Flowsurface from the application menu. Run ./install.sh from a newer archive to upgrade, or ./uninstall.sh to remove the app. Settings and credentials are preserved. For portable use, run ./bin/flowsurface directly.

Having trouble running the file? (Permission/Security warnings)

Windows executables and MSIX installers are code-signed; macOS apps have no Apple Developer ID signature or notarization. Security warnings may still appear.

• Windows: If App Installer cannot verify the publisher or signing certificate, report the installation error.
• macOS: If you see "Developer cannot be verified", control-click (right-click) the app and select Open, or go to System Settings > Privacy & Security to allow it.

Method 2: Build from Source

Requirements

• Rust toolchain
• Git version control system
• System dependencies:
  • Linux:
    • Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config libasound2-dev
    • Arch: sudo pacman -S base-devel alsa-lib
    • Fedora: sudo dnf install gcc make alsa-lib-devel
  • macOS: Install Xcode Command Line Tools: xcode-select --install
  • Windows: No additional dependencies required

Option A: cargo install

# Install latest globally
cargo install --git https://github.com/flowsurface-rs/flowsurface flowsurface

# Run
flowsurface

Option B: Cloning the repo

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/flowsurface-rs/flowsurface

cd flowsurface

# Build and run
cargo build --release
cargo run --release

Platform Notes

Windows

⚠️ Multi-window support is disabled on Windows due to a redraw issue affecting iced’s current winit backend.

Community

Discord: https://discord.gg/RN2XAF7ZuR

Acknowledgments

• Free code signing for Windows releases is provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation
• Kraken Desktop (formerly Cryptowatch), the main inspiration that sparked this project
• Halloy, an excellent open-source IRC client, the main reference for the foundational code design
• And of course, iced, the GUI library that makes this possible

License

Flowsurface is released under GPL-3.0-or-later. Some components use separate licenses:

Component	License
Application, data crate, and bundled indicators	GPL-3.0-or-later
Indicator engine and CLI	Apache-2.0
Optional indicator catalog and its documentation	Apache-2.0
Exchange adapters (flowsurface-exchange)	MIT

Contributions follow the license of the component being changed; submit catalog indicators to the indicators repository.