I agree with you that the GUI does that for me, but I need to have a dashboard with BTC holding, ETH holding etc... I need to be able to get all the info from somewhere...
Electrum is have many forks for other coins, but you need to download wallet for every coin you want to use (BTC,DASH,LTC,BCH...). That dashboard you are thinking is something you can get only if you use some multi-coin wallet like Coinomi, or a hardware wallet like Ledger Nano S/X with Ledger Live where you can see all coins in one dashboard.
If you only want to watch your BTC balance in a watch-only wallet, then just follow HCP advice and use Master Public Key from your Electrum.