Colorpick
written on Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Recently I wrote about my so-called "lightweight project management policy". I am going to start slowly and present a small side-project: Colorpick.
Colorpick is a color picker and contrast checker. I originally wrote it to help me check and fix the background and foreground colors of the Oxygen palette to ensure text was readable. Since then I have been using it to steal colors from various places and as a magnifier to inspect tiny details.
The main window looks like this:
Admittedly, it's a bit ugly, especially the RGB gradients (KGradientSelector and the Oxygen style do not play well together). Nevertheless, it does the job, which is what side-projects are all about.
Here is an annotated image of the window:
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The current color: clicking it brings the standard KDE color dialog. The main reason it's here is because it can be dragged: drag the color and drop on any application which supports color.
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The color in hexadecimal.
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Luminance buttons: click them to adjust the luminance of the color.
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Color picker: brings the magnifier to pick a color from the screen. One nice thing about this magnifier is that it can be controlled from the keyboard: roughly move the mouse to the area where you want to pick a color then position the picker precisely using the arrow keys. When the position is OK: press Enter to pick the color. Pressing Escape or right-clicking closes the magnifier.
Picking the color of the 1-pixel door knob from the home icon. The little inverted-color square in the center shows which pixel is being picked.
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Copy button: clicking this button brings a menu with the color expressed in different formats. Selecting one entry copies the color to the clipboard, ready to be pasted.
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RGB sliders: not much to say here. Drag the cursors or enter values, your choice.
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Contrast test text: shows some demo text using the selected background and foreground colors, together with the current contrast value. It lets you know if your contrast is good enough according to http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#visual-audio-contrast.
Interested? The project is on GitHub at https://github.com/agateau/colorpick. Get it with git clone https://github.com/agateau/colorpick then follow the instructions from the INSTALL.md file.