pastel is a command-line tool to generate, analyze, convert and manipulate colors. It supports many different color formats and color spaces like RGB, HSL, CIELAB, CIELCh as well as ANSI 8-bit and 24-bit representations.

pastel provides a number of commands like saturate, mix or paint. To see a complete list, you can simply run

pastel

To get more information about a specific subcommand (say mix), you can call pastel mix -h or pastel help mix.

Many pastel commands can be composed by piping the output of one command to another, for example:

pastel random | pastel mix red | pastel lighten 0.2 | pastel format hex

Colors can be specified in many different formats:

lightslategray
'#778899'
778899
789
'rgb(119, 136, 153)'
'119,136,153'
'hsl(210, 14.3%, 53.3%)'

Colors can be passed as positional arguments, for example:

pastel lighten 0.2 orchid orange lawngreen

They can also be read from standard input. So this is equivalent:

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

You can also explicitly specify which colors you want to read from the input. For example, this mixes red (which is read from STDIN) with blue (which is passed on the command line):

pastel color red | pastel mix - blue

pastel format hsl ff8000

pastel color "rgb(255,50,127)"

pastel color 556270 4ecdc4 c7f484 ff6b6b c44d58

pastel pick

pastel distinct 8

pastel list

pastel format name 44cc11

bg="hotpink"
fg="$(pastel textcolor "$bg")"

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

pastel paint -n black --on red --bold "   ERROR!   "
echo " A serious error"

pastel paint -n black --on yellow --bold "  WARNING!  "
echo " A warning message"

pastel paint -n black --on limegreen --bold "    INFO    "
echo -n " Informational message with a "
echo -n "highlighted" | pastel paint -n default --underline
echo " word"

You can download the latest Debian package from the release page and install it via dpkg:

wget "https://github.com/sharkdp/pastel/releases/download/v0.5.3/pastel_0.5.3_amd64.deb"
sudo dpkg -i pastel_0.5.3_amd64.deb

You can install pastel from the AUR package:

yay -S pastel

Check out the release page for binary builds.

If you have Rust 1.34 or higher, you can install pastel from source via cargo:

cargo install pastel

Interesting Wikipedia pages:

• Color difference
• CIE 1931 color space
• CIELAB color space
• Line of purples
• Impossible color
• sRGB
• Color theory
• Eigengrau

Color names:

• XKCD Color Survey Results
• Peachpuffs and Lemonchiffons - talk about named colors
• List of CSS color keywords

Maximally distinct colors:

• How to automatically generate N "distinct" colors?
• Publication on two algorithms to generate (maximally) distinct colors

Other articles and videos:

• Color Matching
• Introduction to color spaces

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.