System Color Picker

The familiar color picker supercharged

The macOS color picker as an app with lots of extra features.

Download

Requires macOS 12 or later.

Older versions

• Last macOS 11 compatible version (1.9.6)

Features

• Quickly copy, paste, and convert colors in Hex, HSL, RGB, LCH format
• Show as a normal app or in the menu bar
• Pick a color or toggle the window from anywhere with a global keyboard shortcut
• Make the window stay on top of all other windows
• Launch it at login (when in the menu bar)
• Recently picked colors
• Shortcuts support
• Hide menu bar icon

Tips

• Press the Space key while using the color sampler to show the RGB values. The color sampler is a system component and it can unfortunately not show other kinds of color values.
• Press the Option key when copying the Hex color to invert whether to include #.

Keyboard shortcuts

You can use the following keyboard shortcuts in the app:

• Pick color: Command p
• Copy as Hex: Shift Command h
• Copy as HSL: Shift Command s
• Copy as RGB: Shift Command r
• Copy as LCH: Shift Command l
• Paste color: Shift Command v (In the format Hex, HSL, RGB, or LCH)

Plugins

The built-in color picker supports plugins:

• Scala Color
• Pro Picker
• Material Design
• Color Picker Plus

Screenshots

FAQ

The app does not show up in the menu bar

macOS hides menu bar apps when there is no space left in the menu bar. This is a common problem on MacBooks with a notch. Try quitting some menu bar apps to free up space. If this does not solve it, try quitting Bartender if you have it installed.

What is LCH color?

It's a more human-friendly color format.

Note that the LCH color is currently clamped to sRGB range.

The color changes if I copy and then paste it

That is because the default color space in the picker is Display P3, which is part of CSS Color 4, but the color space used for the legacy CSS color formats is sRGB (browsers are starting to handle color spaces but they are not all there yet).

How do I change the color space?

Right-click the color wheel. You probably want to select “sRGB”.

Note that the color strings will always be converted to sRGB color space.

Can you support SwiftUI.Color / UIColor / NSColor formats?

The best practice is to use Asset Catalog for colors instead of hard-coding the values in code. If you really want to hard-code colors, the Scala color picker plugin supports UIColor and NSColor.

Can I contribute localizations?

I don't have any immediate plans to localize the app.

Built with

• Defaults - Swifty and modern UserDefaults
• Regex - Swifty regular expressions
• KeyboardShortcuts - Add user-customizable global keyboard shortcuts to your macOS app
• LaunchAtLogin - Add “Launch at Login” functionality to your macOS app

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