XCOLOR(1)

💅 XCOLOR(1) — lightweight color picker for X11 💅

okay bestie, welcome to the General Commands Manual page for xcolor, and it's literally giving tiny-but-iconic X11 color picker energy. ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

xcolor — lightweight color picker for X11. slay. 🎀

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

xcolor [-f NAME | -c FORMAT] [-s [SELECTION]] [-S SCALE] [-P PREVIEW_SIZE] [-v] [-h]

🌈 DESCRIPTION 🌈

okay so xcolor is a lightweight color picker for X11, no cap. Grab your mouse, select colors that are visible anywhere on the screen, and get their RGB representation. 💖

By default, the selected color gets printed to standard output. periodt. 🫶

✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -f NAME, --format NAME — says what output format you want. Possible values for NAME are hex, HEX, hex!, HEX!, rgb, and plain. Peep FORMATTING for what each one means. Conflicts with --custom.
• -c FORMAT, --custom FORMAT — gives a template for your custom output format. See CUSTOM FORMATTING for how the template syntax works. Conflicts with --format.
• -s [SELECTION], --selection [SELECTION] — saves output to an X11 selection. Possible values for SELECTION are clipboard, primary and secondary. If SELECTION is not supplied, clipboard is used.
• -S, --scale — magnification scale of the picker, defaults to 8.
• -P, --preview-size — pixel size of the picker, defaults to 255.
• -v, --version — print version information and exit.
• -h, --help — print help message and exit.

🎨 FORMATTING 🎨

By default, the color values are printed in lowercase hexadecimal format. You can change the output format using the --format NAME switch. The possible NAME values are:

• hex — lowercase hexadecimal (default)
• HEX — uppercase hexadecimal
• hex! — compact lowercase hexadecimal
• HEX! — compact uppercase hexadecimal
• rgb — decimal RGB
• plain — decimal with semicolon separators

The compact form refers to CSS three-letter color codes as specified by CSS Color Module Level 3. If the color is not expressible in three-letter form, the regular six-letter form will be used. 💅

🧚 CUSTOM FORMATTING 🧚

The --format switch provides quick access to some commonly used formatting options. However, if custom output formatting is desired, this can be achieved using the --custom 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 examples of valid format strings and what they might translate to:

Format String            Example 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. The diagram below illustrates how we can use these rules to decode a formatting template:

       %{016Br}
         | |||
         | ||`- Channel (red)
         | |`-- Number format specifier (binary)
         | `--- Padding length (16)
         `----- Character to use for padding (0)

The output is the contents of the red color channel formatted in binary and padded with zeroes to be sixteen characters long. 🤯

🌿 ENVIRONMENT 🌿

• XCOLOR_FOREGROUND — disable daemon mode. Because of the way selections work in X11, xcolor forks into background when --selection mode is used. This behavior can be disabled by defining the XCOLOR_FOREGROUND environment variable.

👑 AUTHORS 👑

• Samuel Laurén <samuel.lauren@iki.fi>
• Callum Osmotherly <acheronfail@gmail.com>

💖 bye bestie — that was the 2018 XCOLOR(1) page from the General Commands Manual, mwah! 💖