GNOME Color Browser is used for selecting a screen color to be used by an application. Unlike the default color selector used by GNOME applications, the primary goal of GNOME Color Browser is to let you choose one of a list of already defined colors, hence the name "color browser". It allows you to browse the list of all pre-defined system colors (see ), or define your own "favorite" colors (see ). It can also show you those colors from these lists which most closely match a given one (see ).
Once you have found a color you like, there are two ways you can use this color in an application. The easiest way is to utilize drag and drop: all the color bars you see in the GNOME Color Browser window can be drag-and-dropped onto any GNOME component which has configurable colors. For example, you can drag a color onto GNOME Panel to change Panel's background color, or onto GNOME Terminal to change its background.
You can also use the color with many X Window applications which are not GNOME-compliant, for example with emacs text editor. Most of X applications accept command line options -bg COLOR and -fg COLOR to specify the background and foreground color. COLOR can be either color name, as shown by GNOME Color Browser or its description by a triple of numbers, Red, Green, and Blue (RGB). For example, the command
emacs -bg lightblue -fg darkgreen |
Note that GNOME Color Browser only allows you to select one of the colors known to it (system colors or favorites); you can not use it to "create" new colors. For example, it does not allow you to select a color by entering its Red, Green and Blue (RGB) values. However, it does give you a list of known colors most closely matching given RGB values (see for details).
The menu bar, located at the top of the GNOME Color Browser window, contains the following menus:
This menu contains only one command, Ctrl-Q Quit .
This menu contains commands for changing various settings and preferences of GNOME Color Browser:
Format this option allows you to change the format used by GNOME Color Browser for showing Red, Green and Blue (RGB) values for each color (see details in ). Unless you know what you are doing, it is best to use the default format (8-bit decimal).
Search update this command is described in .
Search in this command is described in .
On drop this command allows you to choose the default action to perform when you drop into GNOME Color Browser window a color from some different source, such as the default GNOME color selector. Possible options are Search it, i.e. automatically switch to Search window and show the best matches to the dropped color among the system colors and favorites, or Add to favorites, i.e. add the dropped color to your list of favorites.
This menu contains:
Manual shows this manual.
About shows basic information about GNOME Color Browser, such as the author's name and the application version number.
The toolbar contains three buttons: Exit, which exits the program, About, which shows basic information about GNOME Color Browser, such as the author's name and the application version number, and Grab, which is used to grab a color of a point anywhere on the screen; its use is described in .