Picking colors
The three-second flow
This is the entire point of the app, so we’ll keep it brief.
- Press your Pick Color hotkey, or right-click the ColorCopy menu bar icon, or open the menu and choose Pick Color.
- macOS shows its built-in magnifier loupe. Move it where you want and click.
- The color is now on your clipboard in your chosen format. Paste it anywhere — your editor, Slack, Figma, anywhere.
Right-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 that hint at the top.
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 Pick Color. 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 Pick Color to whichever shortcut you like.
- Convert Color — for when the color isn’t on screen, but on your clipboard.