Excellent Utilities is a series of cornerstone articles highlighting essential utilities. These are small, indispensable tools, useful for anyone running a Linux machine.
pastel is a command-line tool to generate, analyze, convert and manipulate colors.
This tool supports a variety of color formats and color spaces like RGB (sRGB), HSL, CIELAB, CIELCh as well as ANSI 8-bit and 24-bit representations. Colors can be specified in many different formats. There are a wide range of subcommands available.
What can we do with pastel? We can pick a color anywhere on the screen, generate a set of visually distinct colors, name a given color, convert colors from one format to another, and much more.
Installation
We tested pastel with Manjaro. There’s a package in the Official Repositories (extra) so no compilation is necessary. Install with the command:
$ sudo pacman -S pastel
Alternatively, we can install with yay, a pacman wrapper.
$ yay pastel
If you’re not running Arch or an Arch-based distro, there’s a convenient distro-agnostic snap package available. The developer also provides a .deb package for Debian/Ubuntu users for x86 and x64, and ARM architectures. The other main alternative is to install the software via cargo, a build system and package manager for Rust.
This is cross-platform software. Besides Linux, pastel runs under macOS and Windows. We tested the software in Linux only.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation / Summary
If only more open source software had good docs. It’s an area which is often neglected, probably because it’s boring to write good docs.
It’s hard for many developers to write flowingEnglish documentation if they are not native English speakers themselves. It’s certainly true for me, my English is basic at best.
I usually seek help from my user base for this activity, together with UAT.