GitHub Programming Language Colour Palettes

This repository contains palette files in various formats containing the colours used for all the programming languages on GitHub, along with a Python script which constructs the palette files. Not all languages on GitHub actually have an assigned colour, so only those which do are included.

This was inspired by doda/github-language-colors but I wanted the output to be something which I could feed straight into various other apps (primarily my own Colour Chooser). I originally considered putting together just a small script which would download that JSON file and convert it to other formats, but figured I may as well take the colours straight from the source and output in a number of formats. The number of formats is likely to grow over time.

Palettes

The palette files can be found in the palettes directory in the following formats. If you're after the colours, this is where you want to go - just grab the file format which you need and use it and you don't need to worry about the Python script.

• Colour Chooser palette file (.ccxml)
• GIMP palette (.gpl)
• Adobe Swatch Exchange file (.ase)
• Adobe Photoshop Color Swatch file (.aco)
• JSON file (.json)
• CSV file (.csv)

This should cover most cases but if there's a palette format missing that you'd find useful, add an issue and I'll see what I can do when I have time. Alternatively if you'd like to, feel free to contribute a pull request adding the functionality.

Note: I've purposefully not included palette formats which do not include names for each colour - I thought that missed the point somewhat.

Python Script

The Python script is what grabs the list from GitHub and generates the palette files. The script generates a single palette file in one of the supported formats or I have also included scripts which will generate all the files.

If you want to run the script, you will first need to:

1. Have a recent version of Python 3 installed (>= 3.6).

2. (Optional) Create a virtual environment and activate it. I'd recommend this so the required packages are not installed system-wide.

   python3 -m venv venv
   . venv/bin/activate
   

3. Install the required packages using pip.

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

Once that's done, you're ready to generate a palette. You can generate either a single palette file or all of them.

Generating a single palette

Generate a single palette by running the script, telling it which format you want and what output file you want.

python generate.py --format ccxml path/to/output/file.ccxml

The format is the file extension corresponding to the format you would like. See the 'Palettes' section above for a list of the supported file formats. In the above example, a Colour Chooser palette will be generated.

If you want to use an alternative source URL for the linguist YAML file, you can specify this using the --url option. It will however expect the same format so if you feed it something else, it'll probably just complain.

The script can also provide a help message:

python generate.py --help

Generating all palette files

I've included some shell scripts which will generate all supported palette files. These are what I use to regenerate the files if GitHub update their colours.

These scripts will create a palettes directory if it does not already exist, and then generate the palette files in each format inside with the filename githublangs.xxx. If files do exist, they will be overwritten. You can't pass any options to these scripts so if you need to, you'll need to run it as above yourself.

Bash

./generate-all.sh

PowerShell

./generate-all.ps1

License

The script for generating the palettes is licensed under the MIT license.

The actual palette of colours is part of GitHub's Linguist and therefore usage is dictated by the license for Linguist. At time of writing (May 2019), Linguist was available under the MIT license.