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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is put off by it being an Electron app and are running Windows, here's an AHK[0] script to get the hex code of the pixel color under your cursor and copy it to your clipboard:

---

#h::

MouseGetPos, MouseX, MouseY

PixelGetColor, color, %MouseX%, %MouseY%

StringLower, color, color

clipboard := SubStr(color, 3)

---

It's bound to Win+h (hex color) by default.

It's not fancy, but it works. You just run it in the background and hit the hot key to copy the color whenever you want to. There is no UI.

What's neat about it is the entire source code fits in a tweet: https://twitter.com/nickjanetakis/status/1108825825116332032

And it uses 0.6MB of RAM when running.

[0]: https://www.autohotkey.com/

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AutoHotkey is amazing. It's a little gem of a Windows app. I only wish I discovered it earlier, when I was still using Windows as my main OS.

AHK can be used to trivially fix many usability warts you have with random software, and is powerful enough that someone implemented a clone of dwm tiling window manager in it (bug.n, [0], I used it for more than a year and can attest it works very well).

[0] - https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n

Totally agreed.

I'd go as far as saying AHK is one of the few tools on Windows that I really miss when on a Linux system. It's that good and I don't even know it too well, I just hack things together as needed. Bash is great and all but AHK does so many useful GUI things.

Thanks for the link on bug.n. I use i3 on my Linux laptop and for day to day usage I do prefer a tiled window manager of some sort. My Windows box is my main workstation so having some type of proper tiled wm would be really nice. Currently I use dexpot (virtual workspaces), AHK (global hotkeys), keypirinha (fuzzy find app launcher) and the built in Win 10 window split shortcuts to get as close as I can to an i3 set up.

AutoHotKey is great and the kind of thing that should just be built in to desktop OSs. Why shouldn't I just be able to assign any key combo to anything, contextually? Why do we have to rely on applications supporting hotkeys at all?

This seems like a very Windows-specific complaint, not a general desktop OS one.

Oh? What is the Linux equivalent? I'm aware of KDE having a hotkey system but from what I recall it didn't allow you to bind keys to scripts or contextually. Maybe there's some X component I'm not aware of? That's nice, probably doesn't work in Wayland. Of course in Wayland such things would be left up to the compositor.

"Linux" isn't the only other OS either (and here doesn't quite make sense, seeing as it's a userland detail that doesn't really have anything to do with the kernel the distros share). Apart from the ability to change the keybinding dictionary for basic stuff like copying and pasting and such, Automator on macOS lets you pretty much bind anything to anything.

> It's not fancy

Excuse me, this is one of the tiniest and most useful things i've seen in my life as a budding designer.

Thanks, I'm glad you like it.

It was something I whipped up in 5 minutes about a month ago when I really wanted a quick and dirty color picker. I do use it in practice.

One shortcoming is it doesn't visually show the color after you copy it, but that could also be done with AHK. You could totally have it show a small 16x16 window with the color which would disappear after 2 seconds and would get refreshed after you pick a new color if it were still visible.

You could even go 1 step further and change it to zoom around your cursor on key press, and then copy the color on mouse click while showing a 16x16 window color preview on hover. That would be the ideal solution, but something like that might be 3-4 hours of hacking around with no real AHK knowledge instead of 5 minutes and that wasn't worth it to me at the time.

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