FOSSPicks
Color editor
pastel
Keeping within the territory of doing one simple job well, especially on the command line, pastel
is a tool that helps you work with colors. You type pastel color red
, for example, and a swatch of perfectly rendered color is dropped into your command buffer, complete with checkered background for contrast, Hex, RGB, and HSL values, and a few close color suggestions. Until you start to play with it, you don't realize that there's nothing simple about working with colors. For instance, pastel
needs to parse and output the plethora of color formats, ranges, and color spaces that most of us would rather leave to Photoshop's small print. These include RGB (sRGB), HSL, CIELAB, and CIELCh alongside ANSI with both 8-bit and 24-bit output. However, what it can do with them is quite magical.
Taking the previous example, you can pipe the output from pastel color red
into a new pastel
command with the mix
argument, such as pastel mix -- blue
. This will generate a swatch of the mixed color, complete with similar color names. You can use the format
argument to convert one color format to another, show raw colors from their numeric input, list all CSS color names, or even generate any number of colors from which to choose. If you can't find what you're looking for, you can also use pastel
to pick a color from your screen and take that as the input of the command. All of this is incredibly useful if you're generating colors for print or for CSS. You can even use pastel
in your own scripts to generate color output instead of the incredibly arcane methods used by most terminals by default.

Project Website
https://github.com/sharkdp/pastel
Data-centric shell
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