This utility is not Openbox nor Mabox specific, so you can install and test it in any Arch based distro and X11 based WM or DE. I tested it briefly with XFCE and LXDE.
Package is currently available in Mabox repo
So I’m a color picker/palette/organizer/mixer junkie. This is one of the coolest tools I’ve seen in a lightweight DE!
One thing, unless it is there and I am missing it: how difficult would it be to add a color wheel picker, so that we could create new colors without getting them onto the desktop to pick up with the dropper?
Nothing fancy: something similar to gcolor3 (shown below)? Or a menu to bring up a color chooser. If I can figure out how to add that myself, I will–and will share, of course. I haven’t looked closely enough at mbxcolors to know what it is made of yet.
Glad to hear that this helper is useful to someone, not just me.
This is just a bash script that glues jgmenu and colorpicker together and adds some simple logic. So don’t have too high expectations;)
I often pick up colors from specialized websites.
I think I can just add a detection if other color tools are installed (like gpick, gcolor3) and add their activation to the menu.
Then you will simply be able to run these programs and pick the needed color from them to your palette.
Do you think that would be useful?
I’m a very amateur coder, so the lower the expectations, the better.
I was hoping it was some extension of jgmenu–I’ve successfully done things with it before!
Spent some time today on mbxcolors … and I’m really unhappy that I released it to the public too early.
I should have been testing it and improving it for a few more weeks.
Anyway, this is a beta quality tool at the moment, and you are unintentionally beta testers … sorry.
My to-do list with mbxcolors:
speed, speed, speed … at the moment it will become slow like a turtle when you create just a few color palettes,
add xcolor as picker,
add detection of gpick, gcolor and other similiar tools,
add export palette to GIMP format (.gpl - used also by Inkscape)
test, test, test… before release something next time:)
Those changes will take some time… and unfortunately update will probably require some manual interventions to ~/.config/mbxcolors dir
On the other hand, something optimistic … there is a chance that mbxcolors and someday also other mabox-tools will work on any X11 based environment
Here are screenshots from the Manjaro KDE tests, but what I really want to do is to bring them to some now forgotten and great lightweight window managers like Fluxbox, IceWM etc.
I don’t mind being a beta tester for this sort of thing: a new and useful tool that will only get better.
That said, I’m dealing with a number of other “life issues”, so I may or may not always be prompt with suggestions/bug reports. But I’m fine with using this in whatever iteration it is currently in, to see what might become of it and help when I can.
speed improvements - it is much faster and comfortable now
separate self made palettes from built-in
easy delete colors from picked
use xcolor as picker
@piquet I will look how to include some kind of color selector, this one from PyQt or other
I don’t want to add more hard dependencies, rather detect what is installed and make use of it. I want this utility to be more universal, not for Mabox only.
Do we have any Python expert here? @sng
I’m trying to execute a few lines of Python code from a Bash script …
Seems to be working…
But I don’t know if I’m doing it right.
#!/bin/bash
pycolor() {
read -r -d '' script <<-"----EOF"
import sys
from PyQt5.QtWidgets import *
from PyQt5.QtGui import *
from PyQt5.QtCore import *
class App(QMainWindow):
def __init__(self):
super(self.__class__, self).__init__()
color = QColorDialog.getColor()
print(color.name())
self.exitapplication()
def exitapplication(self): # Exit point
self.close()
sys.exit()
if __name__ == "__main__":
app = QApplication(sys.argv)
ex = App()
----EOF
python -c "$script"
}
color=$(pycolor)
echo "${color}"
Just released and pushed 0.2.0 version.
Uses gcolor3 as color selector and xcolor for picking pixel color from screen.
I think/hope it is not bad at current state
In fact I like it well enough that I wish it were a persistent process instead of a menu that disappears after choosing a color. There was a nice color palette tool on OS X (back when it was still OS X and not Mac OS) called Dragonfly, and this reminds me a little of that: being able to add multiple palettes and have them all on hand to scroll through is useful for graphics nerds like myself.
Haven’t found anything as smoothly functional in Linux yet. gcolor3 is a fine color picker but does not manage multiple palettes easily. gpick is just unnecessarily complex. I have tried learning it several times, and I am not normally bad at learning, but I retain exactly zero bits of the modifier key schema between uses!
If I pick up some energy somewhere, I will see about building GUI apps. I… got distracted learning other things some several years ago and never made it back to gui programming land.
It would be perfect.
Jgmenu has --persistent option but it looks like it is not usable (half implemented?) . Menu stays visible but it grabs pointer and keyboard from whole screen - so you can’t do anything in other windows.
I was looking for some useful color palette manager on Linux but found nothing to suit me. That’s why mbxcolors was created - far from perfect, but I find it very useful when I do something with themes
It has good potential! No idea if I can be of any help: energy levels too unpredictable. So I’ll just say I am thinking about browsing PyQt5. Something may—or may not—happen.
