pastel

Pastel is a command-line tool designed for generating, analyzing, converting, and manipulating colors across various formats and color spaces. It supports a wide range of color representations including RGB (sRGB), HSL, CIELAB, CIELCh, as well as ANSI 8-bit and 24-bit formats, making it a comprehensive solution for color-related tasks.

The tool excels at color format conversion, allowing users to easily transform colors between different representations like hex, HSL, RGB, and named colors. Beyond basic conversion, pastel offers advanced features such as color analysis, picking colors from the screen, generating visually distinct color palettes, and even colorizing terminal text output. Commands can be chained together using pipes, enabling complex color manipulations in a single workflow.

Pastel is particularly valuable for developers, designers, and anyone working with colors in command-line environments. Whether you need to convert a hex color to HSL for CSS work, generate a palette of distinct colors for data visualization, or create colorized output for shell scripts, pastel provides an intuitive interface for these tasks. Its ability to read colors from standard input and support for various color naming conventions makes it highly versatile for automation and scripting scenarios.

Installation

# via Homebrew
brew install pastel

# via APT
sudo apt install pastel

# via Cargo
cargo install pastel