Terminal color picker

This is a terminal based color picker. It is a little tool to help you choose pick colors and translate them from / to different formats. It is linux only but a macos version could happen as it really similar to linux. It is highly inspired by this website.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/063aa337-312d-4ef6-986d-950d8a76b35e

The TUI draws a big square for color selection. This square could not appear completely square depending on your font. For better looking squares, I recommend using a font which has a 1:2 ratio such as FiraCode.

It is mainly a way to learn Zig and do a nice TUI. I don't use any libraries or external dependencies so all you need to compile it is Zig.

Installation

I don't do packaging or releases. If you want to use it, you will need to build it from source.

You need to have zig installed on your system. Then clone this repo, cd into it and run zig build which will compile the program. You can find the output in ./zig-out/bin/color-picker-tui. Then move it to your path or use it as you wish.

Usage

Just drag your mouse over the gradients to select a color. You can also give the colors in the input fields on the right. To validate the input, just press enter. You can also paste in the input fields with Ctrl + Shift + V or p. To copy the color, click on the relevant format at the top.

To quit the program, you can do Ctrl + C, escape or q.

WARNING The clipboard features only work in Wayland. X11 sucks and I don't want to support it.

Note

This is a project I did to learn and explore many things at once. The codebase is really messy and for some parts a disaster. I most likely won't fix it as it is not the purpose. If you are interested, the things I explored are:

• Terminal UI
• Zig general concepts
• Zig comptime (really powerful)
• Buffers
• OOP composition (I now know that I don't like OOP)

I tried to make as little heap allocations as possible which isn't always the best solution. But the allocators concept in Zig is really strong and I should probably explore it more. I also don't use any other dependencies than zig's standard library.