pastel

Use the paint command to output colorized text to the terminal. This is useful for creating styled logs or status messages.

Basic usage with background and foreground:

# Set a background color
bg="hotpink"
# Get the foreground color that works with that background
fg="$(pastel textcolor "$bg")"

pastel paint "$fg" --on "$bg" "well readable text"

Common patterns for status messages:

# Error message with black text on red background
pastel paint -n black --on red --bold "   ERROR!   "
echo " A serious error"

# Warning message with black text on yellow background
pastel paint -n black --on yellow --bold "  WARNING!  "
echo " A warning message"

# Info message with underline
echo -n " Informational message with a "
echo -n "highlighted" | pastel paint -n default --underline
echo " word"

Use the colorcheck command to verify if your terminal emulator supports 24-bit true color mode (16,777,216 colors). If the terminal does not support true color, pastel will fallback to 8-bit approximations (256 colors).

To verify the output visually, ensure the color panels appear consistent. To verify the output precisely, you can use a colorpicker (via pastel pick) to check that the three colors in the 24-bit panels match these values (from left to right):

• #492732, rgb(73, 39, 50)
• #10331e, rgb(16, 51, 30)
• #1d365a, rgb(29, 54, 90)

pastel colorcheck

pastel provides several subcommands for color manipulation.

• To see a complete list of commands, run: pastel
• To get help for a specific subcommand (e.g., mix), run: pastel mix -h or pastel help mix.

Common subcommands mentioned include:

• saturate
• mix
• paint
• lighten
• format
• color
• pick
• distinct
• list
• textcolor

Use pastel to transform colors between different color spaces or to inspect them.

Convert format: Convert a color (e.g., hex) to another format (e.g., HSL):

pastel format hsl ff8000

Name a color: Find the name of a specific color:

pastel format name 44cc11

Analyze/Show colors: Display colors in the terminal:

pastel color "rgb(255,50,127)"
pastel color 556270 4ecdc4 c7f484 ff6b6b c44d58

pastel can automate color palette generation and list retrieval.

Generate N visually distinct colors:

pastel distinct 8

List all X11 / CSS color names:

pastel list

Pick a color from the screen:

pastel pick

You can manually override the detected color mode by setting the PASTEL_COLOR_MODE environment variable. Supported values are:

• 24bit or truecolor for TrueColor support.
• 8bit for 8-bit ANSI support.
• off to disable colors.

pastel accepts colors in many formats, which can be passed as positional arguments or read from standard input (STDIN).

Supported Formats:

• Color names: lightslategray, orchid, orange
• Hex strings: '#778899', 778899
• Short hex: 789
• RGB: 'rgb(119, 136, 153)', '119,136,153'
• HSL: 'hsl(210, 14.3%, 53.3%)

Usage Examples:

Passing as positional arguments:

pastel lighten 0.2 orchid orange lawngreen

Reading from STDIN:

printf "%s\n" orchid orange lawngreen | pastel lighten 0.2

Mixing a color from STDIN with a color from the command line:

pastel color red | pastel mix - blue

If pastel warns that your terminal does not appear to support 24-bit colors, you can verify your terminal's capabilities by running the colorcheck subcommand.

To resolve the warning:

1. Run pastel colorcheck to test support.
2. If supported, set PASTEL_COLOR_MODE=24bit to force the mode.
3. If not supported, set PASTEL_COLOR_MODE=8bit to use 8-bit colors and silence the warning.

When you pass pick as a color argument, pastel invokes an external color picker configured in your settings.

If pick is provided as a positional argument, pastel will print a color spectrum to the terminal before opening the picker. Subsequent color arguments in the same command will not trigger the spectrum print again.