Picking colors

The three-second flow

This is the entire point of the app, so we’ll keep it brief.

1. Press your Quick Pick hotkey, or right-click (or control-click) the ColorCopy menu bar icon, or open the menu and choose Quick Pick.
2. macOS shows its built-in magnifier loupe. Move it where you want and click.
3. The color is now on your clipboard in your chosen format. Paste it anywhere — your editor, Slack, Figma, anywhere.

Right-click (or control-click) on the menu bar icon is the absolute fastest path when you’ve forgotten you didn’t set a hotkey. The menu also shows a “Control-click for quick pick” hint at the top.

Can’t find the menu bar icon?

ColorCopy has no dock icon and no main window. It lives entirely in the menu bar, up near the clock. If you launched it and can’t spot it:

• Your menu bar is probably full. macOS hides overflow icons when there’s no room, and on laptops the notch eats into that space. Quit a few other menu bar apps, or use a menu bar manager like Ice or Bartender to reveal and reorder hidden items.
• Confirm it’s running. Open ColorCopy again from your Applications folder. It won’t open a window — that’s expected — but the menu bar icon will appear.
• Switch to a more visible icon. Open Settings → General → Menu bar icon and pick a different style. ColorCopy ships three: picker, swatch, and palette.

Picking from any app, anywhere

ColorCopy uses Apple’s sandboxed system color sampler (the same out-of-process API that Xcode and Preview use). That means it can:

• Pick from any native app, including dialogs, menus, and toolbars.
• Pick from web pages in Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Arc, anything.
• Pick from videos — YouTube, QuickTime, screen recordings.
• Pick from PDFs, screenshots, Figma, Sketch, Photoshop, Affinity, all of it.
• Pick from a second monitor without breaking a sweat.

And because it’s sandboxed, it doesn’t need Screen Recording, Accessibility, or any other permission. macOS hands ColorCopy a single pixel value and that’s the end of the exchange.

Cancelling a pick

Press Escape while the loupe is on screen and the pick is cancelled. Nothing changes, nothing copies.

What gets copied

The picked color is formatted using your current settings — format, hash prefix, casing, and decimal places — and written to the system pasteboard as plain text. That’s the same text you’d see if you typed it yourself, just without the typing.

If you want to know exactly which formats and toggles are available, head to the color formats guide.

Recent colors

Every successful pick lands in the menu bar’s Recent Colors submenu. Click any entry and that exact color goes back on your clipboard, in your current format — so a hex you picked yesterday can be re-copied as a SwiftUI literal today.

You can configure how many recents to keep (0 to 50) under Settings → General → Recent colors in menu. Set it to 0 to hide the submenu entirely.

To wipe history, open the Recent Colors submenu and click Clear Recent Colors at the bottom.

Sound feedback

By default, ColorCopy plays a soft drop sound on copy. There are nine sounds to choose from (or none) under Settings → General → Copy sound. Picking one previews it.

Free tier limits

Free ColorCopy lets you copy 50 colors per month, resetting on the first of each month. The menu shows your usage count above the Quick Pick item. When you hit the cap, ColorCopy opens the upgrade window and waits for you. Pro removes the cap. Nothing else changes.

Related

• Color formats — pick the output format and customize the syntax.
• Global hotkeys — bind Quick Pick to whichever shortcut you like.
• Color Picker — for when the color isn’t on screen, but on your clipboard.