scolorpicker (smooll's Color Picker) is a color picker application available on Linux for both X11 and Wayland!

• Features
  • Completed
• Installation
  • Dependencies
    • X11
    • Wayland
  • AUR
    • yay
    • paru
  • Manual (Building from Source)
    • Cloning
    • Legacy Version
    • Configuration
    • Building
• Usage
• Contributing
  • Donation
  • Reporting an Issue

Here's a list of features both completed and planned marked by versions which they came in.

• color preview of the current hovered over pixel (v1.0.0)
• color formats:
  • hex (v1.0.0)
  • lhex (v2.0.0)
  • rgb (v1.1.0)
  • hsl (v2.0.0)
  • hsv (v2.0.0)
  • all (v2.0.0)
• color outputs:
  • terminal (v1.1.0)
  • clipboard (v1.0.0)
• localization (v2.1.0): available languages include:
  • English
  • Polish
• constrict color preview to screen bounds (v2.4.0)
• rounded color preview borders (v2.4.0)

scolorpicker has a couple installation methods with more (like a flatpak package) planned.

• SDL3 (*)

• Xlib or xcb (for screenshots)
• xcb-image (only if using xcb)
• xsel (for copying to clipboard)

• sdbus-c++ (for screenshots) (*)
• desktop portal which supplies Screenshot + its dependencies (e.g. xdg-desktop-portal-wlr + grim)
• wl-clipboard (for copying to clipboard)

(*) - if installing through the AUR or building manually, these are optional as in, they can be downloaded and built automatically without having to install said dependencies system-wide.

If using Arch Linux, you can very simply install scolorpicker from the AUR (Arch User Repository) using an AUR helper (e.g. yay or paru).

$ yay -S scolorpicker

$ paru -S scolorpicker

If you cannot use any of the above options for installation, you can always build manually, and thanks to the way scolorpicker is set up, you need only three commands to clone, build and install your very own version!

When cloning the repo, be sure to clone a specific tag and not the master branch. This will ensure that your build is stable.

git clone --depth=1 --branch=v2.5.2 https://github.com/smooll-d/scolorpicker.git

v2.0.0 marks the complete, from the ground up rewrite of scolorpicker in C++ instead of C and SDL3 to handle everything other than screenshots.

For those that use X11 only and don't want to install so many dependencies, there is a "backup" of the first version on the legacy branch which can be cloned like this:

git clone --depth=1 --branch=legacy https://github.com/smooll-d/scolorpicker.git

scolorpicker comes with some options you can enable to configure the platform for which you're building:

If you don't know what to do, use this:

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_PREFIX_INSTALL=/usr

It will detect what your system is automatically.

Remove -DCMAKE_PREFIX_INSTALL=/usr if you do not wish to install scolorpicker system-wide.

cmake --build build -j$(nproc)

This will build the project using as many jobs as there are cores on your processor. It'll take much less time to build.

cmake --build build --target dist

If you used -DCMAKE_PREFIX_INSTALL=/usr, you can install scolorpicker system-wide:

sudo cmake --install build

The most basic usage of scolorpicker is:

scolorpicker

By default, it'll print the color in uppercase hex to the terminal.

If you'd like to read up about what more's there to do, you can either:

scolorpicker --help

or:

man scolorpicker

Have fun!

If you like scolorpicker and would like to contribute in some way, you can do it in two ways.

The best way to donate is to my PayPal, but you can also donate to my Ko-fi. Don't worry, there are no memberships.

If you've found a bug or would like to submit a feature request for a new output method or format, you can do it in the Issues tab.