Swatches

Overview

Swatches is a program for looking at all the colors your terminal can display, and you can use a variety of different formats to do so. Swatches is written entirely in Haskell using Brick, and should run in both Linux and MacOS terminals, but probably not Windows (I've only tested it with Linux).

Below are a few examples of what you can do with Swatches; however, for a description of everything possible with Swatches, try running swatches --help | less.

View colors sorted by RGB values

By default, Swatches will display the default RGB hexcode, the ANSI code, a colored string and a colored swatch for each color. The colors can be sorted (descending) by the default RGB values in the that order (i.e., red, then green and finally blue) by running swatches -s rgb to get:

(Note that the screen has been cropped in this example, and any user-defined colors may have an incorrect hexcode, which will be based on the default values (e.g., the ANSI 11 and 15 colors in the above image).)

View colors sorted by HSV values

You can also sort (descending) the default output format by the hue, saturation and value of each color. In this case, the command is swatches -s hsv to get:

(Note that the screen has been cropped in this example, and any user-defined colors may have an incorrect hexcode, which will be based on the default values (e.g., the ANSI 9 color in the above image).)

Sort the colors any way you want

The -s/--sort option will take any combination of hsvrgb for sorting by hue, saturation, value, red channel, green channel or blue channel, respectively. Likewise, you can sort by the ANSI codes using --sort=ansi option. For example, if the -s/--sort option is not used, the default triple is svh (i.e., sort by saturation, then value and finally hue), which gives rainbows of decreasing saturation (see block example below). Alternatively, the sort code rh will sort by the red channel and then the hue. All sorts are descending by default; however, you can get ascending sorts by using the -a option.

View colors in a compact block

The default display takes up a lot of space; however, you can use the block mode to display everything more compactly with just the ANSI code and a color swatch. You can sort the colors in this mode too using the -s/--sort option; however, the first 16 colors are displayed separately. For example, running swatches block, which will use the default svh sort (left-to-right), gives the following output:

Find best hexcode matches

If you know the hexcode of the color you want, then you can try to find the closest matches available based on the default hexcodes of the 256 terminal colors. For example, if you want to match the light-blue color #4ab4ff, then try swatches match 4ab4ff, and if you want to match the orange color #ffb852, then try swatches match ffb852, to get:

(Note that some matches may be incorrect if you have redefined some of the colors in your terminal from their default values. This will likely be the case for the first 16 ANSI colors.)

View colors using an interactive 3D RGB-cube

In a 256-color terminal, 216 of the colors form a discrete 6x6x6 RGB space. You can use Swatches to view and manipulate this "RGB-color-cube" interactively using the swatches cube command:

(In this GIF, the ANSI 224 and 194 colors are not displaying quite right, which is likely due to the limited colors available to the GIF format. The colors should appear correctly in a 256-color terminal.)

Getting help

Swatches comes equipped with extensive help that details all of its features and usage. You can display help by running

swatches --help | less

Compiling, installation and uninstallation

Swatches uses the Haskell Tool Stack. Clone the repository and build with

git clone https://github.com/MWRuszczycky/swatches.git
cd swatches
stack build

You can then run Swatches isolated within the repository using

stack exec swatches

Alternatively, you can install swatches locally using

stack install

instead of stack build from within the repository. Stack will tell you where the binary has been locally installed (e.g., ~/.local/bin) in case you want to later uninstall Swatches. Now you can run the program anywhere by just typing swatches at the terminal.

You can remove Swatches by simply deleting the associated binary and repository, because it does not maintain any configuration files, etc.

Terminal settings

By default Swatches sets the TERM environment parameter to xterm-256color. You can change this by using the --terminal=MYTERM option.

To do

• Some functions still need commenting.
• See if there is a better way to handle or warn about user-defined colors resulting in incorrect hexcodes.