Using GNOME Color Browser

Working with multiple documents

The main GNOME Color Browser window may contain several sub-windows ("views"). Each of these views shows either a contents of a palette (system or your personal one) or a search window, used for finding matching colors. For example, in the default configuration GNOME Color Browser starts with 4 views: two showing the system palette (one listing colors by name, the other using small color squares to represent them), a view of the users palette (originally empty), and a search window. Having multiple views can be very convenient if you want to work with several palettes at the same time, use drag and drop to move a color from one palette to another, etc.

To switch between views, click on the views tab at the top (provided that you are using default GTK theme) of the window. If there are too many open views so that the tabs do not fit the screen, you will see 2 arrows at the top right of GNOME Color Browser window; these arows allow you to scroll through the tabs.

Every time you open a new view, a new sub-window is added to the existing ones. To close a view, select File->Close->Close view or click on the Close in the toolbar. If you have several views showing the same document, you can close all of them by selecting File->Close->Close document (do not forget to save it first if you made any changes). Finally, you can also drag a view tab out of GNOME Color Browser window; this will create a new GNOME Color Browser window, showing this view.

Using a color for an application

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 a system color name, as shown by GNOME Color Browser or its description by a triple of numbers, Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) values. For example, the command

emacs -bg lightblue -fg darkgreen

will start emacs with light blue background and dark green foreground. Note that contrary to common UNIX conventions, color names are case-insensitive. More information about colors in X Window System, RGB values, color depth, etc. is given in the section called Colors in X Window System.