Show HN: Eight-Bit Color Picker

http://bilalq.github.io/eight-bit-color-picker/

by bilalq • 12 years ago

35 5 12 years ago

bilalq.github.io

What is this for? I'm not being snarky; I can't figure out what the use case is and I'm curious.

bilalq2• 12 years ago

While most applications these days can display millions of colors, many developers use one that is restricted to just 256 colors on a day to day basis: their terminal. (Yes, technically iTerm and and a few others can display millions of colors, but the $TERM cannot).

What's more, is that the palette for those colors tends to be different based on configurations in XResources and the like, so it needs to be able to support custom palettes.

I built this with the intention to use it as a component in my rewrite of Villustrator[1], a vim colorscheme generator. I'm going to rebuild it with CLI vim as its sole focus.

Of course, this can also be used for retro art web apps and the like.

[1] http://villustrator.com/

_superposition_• 12 years ago

I can use it to help me with my fledgling pixel art!

chavesn• 12 years ago

Unfortunately the colors of the web-safe color palette that we all know[1] (and hopefully hate) that results from combining 00, 33, 66, 99, CC and FF into triplet permutations has extremely poor color distribution.

Can you find any oranges in that color picker? Maybe 2. What about blues or reds? Pretty much the same. But you can find a ton of teals, purples, and pinks!

This is because producing naive permutations of fixed steps results mostly in muddy hue variance between the primaries. This is not the natural way we see color variance. It results in far too many unique hues and not enough shades of the "good" hues ("red", "orange", "yellow", etc.). We only really distinguish between 7-15 hues at a basic level, but then we are used to seeing many shades of those same hues.

In addition, because the way the permutations are created it would be a ton of work to figure out how to sort them by hue. And if you did, you would notice just how many hues there are (way too many to care about having so many).

A much better color picker will take just a handful of hues (again, 7-15 or so) and then present varying shades (lighter, usually, but also darker for more variance) of them. Another crucial factor is to make sure the color picker includes a row for all shades from black to white (which at least this color picker has done).

For an example of a color picker that does this well with just a handful of colors, see the Google docs color picker.[2] You'll notice how much more pleasing it is to the eye.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors#Web-safe_colors

[2] https://www.google.com/help/hc/images/docs/docs_1696586_colo...

bilalq2• 12 years ago

All excellent points! However, the default palette here is not based on the web safe colors, but on the colors from xterm-256color. More importantly, the palette is entirely customizable on a per instance basis of this picker. You can use this component to build something similar to the one from the Google docs picker just by passing in a string array of the palette.

My primary motivation for building this was to help applications that target CLIs. Things like colorscheme generators/editors for vim & emacs can benefit greatly from this.

Show HN: Eight-Bit Color Picker

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