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Color Picker

The short version: Open the window, dial in a color visually or paste one, look at every format at once, click the one you want.

When to reach for it

Quick Pick is for colors you can see. The Color Picker window is for everything else: dialing in a color from scratch, converting a hex you already have into another syntax, or seeing every supported format for a single color all at once.

Opening the window

  • Press your Color Picker hotkey (set it under Settings → Hotkeys).
  • Click the menu bar icon and choose Color Picker….

If your clipboard contains a parseable color when you open the window, ColorCopy auto-fills the input with it. So the typical flow is: copy a hex from somewhere, hit your hotkey, the window opens with the color already loaded. Profile-Roy-G.-Biv levels of efficiency.

The visual picker

The top half of the window is a full visual color picker:

  • Saturation / brightness square — drag the marker to set saturation and brightness.
  • Hue slider — sets hue along the rainbow.
  • Alpha slider — sets opacity. Most formats with an alpha channel pick it up.
  • Eyedropper button — the colored square next to the sliders. Click it to open the screen sampler. The window slides out of the way while you sample, then comes back with the picked color loaded.

The picker, the input field below, and the format list all stay in sync. Drag a slider, the input updates. Type a hex, the picker jumps to it. Click the eyedropper, everything shows the screen-picked color.

The input field

Below the picker, type or paste anything ColorCopy can parse:

  • Hex — #7A5CF0, 7a5cf0, #fff, #7A5CF0FF (3, 4, 6, or 8 digits)
  • CSS RGB / RGBA — rgb(122, 92, 240), rgba(122, 92, 240, 0.5)
  • CSS HSL / HSLA — hsl(250, 83%, 65%), hsla(250, 83%, 65%, 0.8)
  • CSS color names — rebeccapurple, tomato, papayawhip, the full standard set

If something doesn’t parse, the input border turns red and you get a brief hint about what to try. A small × button inside the field clears the input in one click.

The format list

Below the input, every supported format is listed in groups: Web, NSColor, UIColor, SwiftUI, Objective-C, .NET, Java, Android. Each row shows the format name on the left and the formatted value on the right.

Click any row to copy that specific format to your clipboard. Your default format setting under Settings → Format isn’t touched.

The buttons next to the input

  • Copy — copies the current color in your default format (the one set under Settings → Format).
  • Bolt (close on copy) — toggles whether copying dismisses the window. On by default; the fastest path for “I have one color, I need it in this one format”. Turn it off when you’re converting a batch.

The output respects your settings

Hash prefix, hex casing, and decimal precision toggles still apply. So if you’ve told ColorCopy you want lowercase hex with no #, that’s what shows up in the HEX row — and that’s what gets copied.

Closing the window

Press Esc or Cmd-W, or just click somewhere else. The window remembers its size and position for next time.

Free tier limits

Each row-click (and clicking the Copy button, and using the eyedropper) counts as one copy against the free tier’s monthly cap. Just like Quick Pick. Pro removes the cap.

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