Lightweight color picker for X11. Use mouse cursor to select colors visible anywhere on the screen to view their RGB representation.
Currently, the easiest way to install xcolor is to use cargo:
shell
$ cargo install xcolor
Building and running xcolor requires xcb
libraries to be present. There are also statically linked releases available on
the GitHub releases page. These
binaries should work on most current Linux systems without any additional
dependencies.
Simply invoke the xcolor command to select a color. The selected color will be
printed to the standard output.
``` xcolor 0.1.0 Samuel Laurén samuel.lauren@iki.fi Lightweight color picker for X11
USAGE: xcolor [OPTIONS]
FLAGS: -h, --help Prints help information -V, --version Prints version information
OPTIONS:
-c, --custom
By default, the color values will be printed in lowercase hexadecimal format.
The output format can be changed using the -f FORMAT switch. The possible
format values are listed bellow:
| Format Specifier | Description | Example | Custom Format Equivalent |
| ---------------- | --------------------------------- | --------------------- | ------------------------ |
| hex | Lowercase hexadecimal (default) | #ff00ff | #%{02hr}%{02hg}%{02hb} |
| HEX | Uppercase hexadecimal | #00FF00 | #%{02Hr}%{02Hg}%{02Hb} |
| rgb | Decimal RGB | rgb(255, 255, 255) | rgb(%{r}, %{g}, %{b}) |
| plain | Decimal with semicolon separators | 0;0;0 | %{r};%{g};%{b} |
The -f switch provides quick access to some commonly used formatting options.
However, if custom output formatting is desired, this can be achieved using the
-c FORMAT switch. The FORMAT parameter specifies a template for the output
and supports a simple template language.
FORMAT templates can contain special expansions that are written inside
%{...} blocks. These blocks will be expanded into color values according to
the specifiers defined inside the block. Here are some examples of valid format
strings and what they might translate to:
| Format String | Possible Output |
| ------------------------ | ------------------ |
| %{r} %{g} %{b} | 255, 0, 100 |
| Green: %{-4g} | Green: ---7 |
| #%{02hr}%{02hg}%{02hb} | #00ff00 |
| %{016Br} | 0000000000000011 |
Expansion blocks in format strings always contain a channel specifier (r for
red, g for green, and b for blue). Additionally, they can contain an
optional number format specifier (h for lowercase hexadecimal, H for
uppercase hexadecimal, o for octal, B for binary, and d for decimal) and
an optional padding specifier consisting of a character to use for padding and
the length the string should be padded to. We can use these rules to decode the
above example string:
%{016Br}
| |||
| ||`- Channel (red)
| |`-- Number format specifier (binary)
| `--- Padding length (16)
`----- Character to use for padding (0)
In the output, we get the contents of the red color channel formatted in binary and padded with zeroes to be sixteen characters long.