pastel 0.4.0

A command-line tool to generate, analyze, convert and manipulate colors
Documentation

pastel

A command-line tool to generate, analyze, convert and manipulate colors.

pastel provides a collection of commands to work with colors on the terminal. It supports many different color formats and color spaces like RGB, HSL, CIELAB, CIELCh as well as ANSI 8-bit and 24-bit representations.

In action

pastel in action

Tutorial

Getting help

pastel provides a number of commands like saturate, mix or paint. To see a complete list, you can simply run

pastel

To get more information about a specific subcommand (say mix), you can call pastel mix -h or pastel help mix.

Composition

Many pastel commands can be composed by piping the output of one command to another, for example:

pastel random | pastel mix red | pastel lighten 0.2 | pastel format hex

Specifying colors

Colors can be specified in many different formats:

lightslategray
'#778899'
778899
789
'rgb(119, 136, 153)'
'119,136,153'
'hsl(210, 14.3%, 53.3%)'

Colors can be passed as positional arguments, for example:

pastel lighten 0.2 orchid orange lawngreen

They can also be read from standard input. So this is equivalent:

printf "%s\n" orchid orange lawngreen | pastel lighten 0.2

You can also explicitly specify which colors you want to read from the input. For example, this mixes red (which is read from STDIN) with blue (which is passed on the command line):

pastel color red | pastel mix - blue

Use cases and demo

Converting colors from one format to another

pastel format hsl ff8000

Show and analyze colors on the terminal

pastel color "rgb(255,50,127)"

pastel color 556270 4ecdc4 c7f484 ff6b6b c44d58

Pick a color from somewhere on the screen

pastel pick

Get a list of all X11 / CSS color names

pastel list

Print colorized text from a shell script

bg="hotpink"
fg="$(pastel textcolor "$bg")"

pastel paint "$fg" --on "$bg" "well readable text"

pastel paint -n black --on red --bold "   ERROR!   "
echo " A serious error"

pastel paint -n black --on yellow --bold "  WARNING!  "
echo " A warning message"

pastel paint -n black --on limegreen --bold "    INFO    "
echo -n " Informational message with a "
echo -n "highlighted" | pastel paint -n default --underline
echo " word"

Resources

Interesting Wikipedia pages:

Color names:

Maximally distinct colors:

Other articles and videos: