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Palettes

The short version: Open the palettes window, browse the built-ins, build your own, and star the swatches you actually use. Starred swatches show up under Favorites in the menu bar — one click and that color’s on your clipboard.

Opening the window

  • Press your Palettes hotkey.
  • Click the menu bar icon and choose Palettes….

The window is floating and resizable. Drag any corner to taste.

Anatomy of a palette

A palette has a name and one or more scales. A scale has a name and a list of swatches. A swatch has a value (the color), an optional label (e.g. blue-600), and a star state.

This three-layer structure is why every preset palette feels so usable: Tailwind → Blue → 600, Material → Primary → 70. Build your own palettes the same way and they’ll feel just as tidy.

Built-in presets

ColorCopy ships with 24 preset palettes, ready to use. Choose New Palette → From Preset… and pick from:

  • Adobe Spectrum
  • Ant Design
  • Apple System Colors
  • Atlassian Design System
  • Bootstrap 5
  • Bulma
  • Chakra UI
  • GitHub Primer
  • GOV.UK Design System
  • Harmony
  • IBM Carbon
  • Mantine
  • Material Design 3
  • Microsoft Fluent UI
  • MUI
  • Open Color
  • Pico CSS
  • Radix Colors
  • Salesforce Lightning
  • Shopify Polaris
  • Tailwind
  • USWDS
  • Vercel Geist

First launch seeds your library with Mantine, Open Color, and Tailwind as a starting point. You can delete or rearrange them later. Every preset is also available to add at any time.

Creating your own

Choose New Palette → Create from Scratch. Give it a name. Add scales. Add swatches to each scale. Drag to reorder palettes, scales, or individual swatches — you can even drag a swatch from one scale into a different one. Done. Custom palettes are saved automatically and survive across launches.

Two other ways to start a custom palette:

Renaming and reorganizing

Click the palette name or a scale name to open a rename popover. Right-click (or control-click) either label for the full options menu — rename, duplicate, delete, add a swatch, or sort scales Light to Dark / Dark to Light.

The status bar at the bottom of the window shows a hint when you hover a label, so you don’t have to remember any of this.

Editing swatches

Click a swatch to copy it to the clipboard in your current format. That’s the happy path.

Right-click a swatch for the rest:

  • Edit Color… — change the color value or label.
  • Add to Favorites / Remove from Favorites — toggle the star.
  • Copy — copy in your default format.
  • Copy As … — copy in any of the 21 supported formats without changing your default.
  • Delete Color.

Palettes and scales each have their own right-click menus with Rename, Duplicate, Delete, and (for scales) Sort Light to Dark / Sort Dark to Light.

Favorites: the menu bar shortcut

This is the secret weapon of ColorCopy. Star any swatch (click the star, or use the right-click menu) and it appears under Favorites in the menu bar — grouped by source palette, in the natural order they appear in that palette.

One click on a Favorites entry copies the color in your current format. No window, no dialog, no friction. The fastest path between “I want my brand color on my clipboard” and your clipboard.

Pinned colors auto-update if you rename or recolor the source swatch. Delete the source palette and the pin is removed cleanly.

Swatch size

The toolbar has a size slider (nine steps from 18 pt to 50 pt, in even 4 pt increments). Pick whatever fits your screen and your eyes. The setting is global.

Close on copy

By default, clicking a swatch copies and keeps the window open. Want it to dismiss after each copy — the fast path for “hotkey, click, paste, get back to work”? Toggle the bolt button in the toolbar to enable Close on copy.

Import & export

Bring palettes in from .ase, .clr, or .json. Send them out to .ase, .clr, JSON, CSS custom properties, HTML, plain text, PNG, or PDF. See Import & export for the details.

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