Piping colors from another app

LuciusPollucius · December 29, 2023, 1:06pm

Hi, i was trying to find a way to copy colors from my color picker to foreground color on linux. For example

xcolor > example.txt

will give me ability to click on any pixel from Firefox/PureReference and create a file with one hex string like

#c4b040

Is there a way to do something like:

xcolor > aseprite --foreground-color

Linux clipboard experience with aseprite is horrendous(i know that its mostly x11 fault), it can take half a minute and 20 clicks to copypaste hex value from it, but i thought that maybe i don’t need to do copypasting it in the first place. Think simple shortcut like Alt+e - click anywhere you want - continue drawing

dacap · December 29, 2023, 1:46pm

Hi @LuciusPollucius, I think the easiest way to fix this would be to finally implement picking colors from the desktop on X11:

github.com

aseprite/laf/blob/157533d1600d424e089be859148aa71a169111f2/os/x11/system.h#L53-L76


      
            gfx::Color getColorFromScreen(const gfx::Point& screenPosition) const override {
          #if 0
              ::Display* display = X11::instance()->display();
              int screen = XDefaultScreen(display);
              ::Window root = XDefaultRootWindow(display);
          
              // TODO XGetImage() crashes with a BadMatch error
              XImage* image = XGetImage(display, root,
                                        screenPosition.x,
                                        screenPosition.y, 1, 1, AllPlanes, ZPixmap);
              if (image) {
                XColor color;
                color.pixel = XGetPixel(image, screenPosition.x, screenPosition.y);
                XFree(image);
          
                XQueryColor(display, XDefaultColormap(display, screen), &color);
          
                // Each red/green/blue channel is 16-bit, so we have to convert to 8-bit.
                return gfx::rgba(color.red>>8, color.green>>8, color.blue>>8);
              }

This file has been truncated. show original

On Windows and macOS you can click the foreground color button and drag the mouse to pick colors from other apps, not sure if this would fix your specific use case.

LuciusPollucius · December 29, 2023, 2:14pm

Yeah, dragging mouse doesn’t work in my case, naked os without desktop environment hah. For all the problems what you have with linux, still its only way to work on ancient necroPC.