colort[int]

A small program for 'tinting' colors by values. Also supports inverting colors.

command	output
colort 1 "#000000"	#010101
colort -l 1 "#FFFFFF"	#FFFFFF
colort -l 1 "#FFFFFF"	#FFFFFF, exit status 0
colort -i "#000000"	#FFFFFF
colort 60 "#000000"	#3C3C3C
colort -60 "#000000"	#C4C4C4
colort -s 4 1 "spam000000spam"	spam010101spam
colort -t -s 4 1 "spam000000spam"	010101
colort -t "ff000000"	000000
colort -r 1 "#000000"	#010000

Notes:

• The color is assumed to be the last 6 chars of the input string (can be changed with -s)
• If the tint value is omitted, defaults to 0.
• The -l flag limits color tinting by not letting values roll around.
  • if 2 or more of RGB is limited when this is turned on, exit status of 1.
• The -i flag inverts colors.
• The -s flag selects the index in the input string to start getting color from.
• The -t flag makes the output only the color string
• The -c flag calculates the contrast of the color. If this evaluates to black, exit status 0. If white, exit status 1.
• If the -r, -g, or -b flags are used, red, green, or blue are affected by the operation respectively.
• The tint value can be within the set of values supported by a long datatype.

Example use cases:

Invert a background color to have readable text on any background:

Auto-determine select and icon colors for GTK themes based on the background (using oomox and acyl in these examples)

• Select_color="$(colort -c "$BG" && colort 25 "$BG" || colort -25 "$BG")"
  • If the background contrast is 'dark', tint up, else tint down.
• Icon_color="$(colort -c "$BG" && colort -l 80 "$BG" || colort -l -80 "$BG")"
  • the same logic, but tinted further to make icons more bold, and a flag to top out at white or black.

If for some reason we wanted everything to have a blue tint, we can wrap both the above calls with a colort -b 40:

Input background colors used for the examples: 282828, AB4642, D8D8D8 from base16 colorsets.

TODO

• consider accepting input from STDIN
• update the man page