Screen Color Picker

Color picker for Linux

On Linux, the go-to color pickers (gpick, KColorChooser, GNOME's Eyedropper) vary by distro and desktop, and some older X11 tools can't read the screen at all under Wayland. A Chromium-based browser gives you the same eyedropper everywhere, with no apt, dnf or flatpak step.

Last updated

Pick a color — instant, picks from anywhere on screen (even outside the browser).
Screenshot — when you need to pick from another tab without losing focus.

How to do it

  1. Open this page in Chrome, Chromium, Brave, Edge or Vivaldi on Linux.
  2. Click “Pick a color”.
  3. Hover over any pixel, in a terminal, an IDE, GIMP or another monitor, and click.
  4. Copy the value you need. HEX and OKLCH are ready to paste straight into CSS.

Tips and gotchas

  • Under Wayland, some Chromium builds go through the desktop portal for screen access. If the live picker fails, use screenshot mode, which goes through the standard xdg-desktop-portal screen-share dialog.
  • Firefox on Linux doesn't implement EyeDropper. Screenshot mode still works there.
  • Fractional scaling can blend neighbouring pixels. Sample from the middle of a flat area, not an edge.
  • Snap and Flatpak browser sandboxes sometimes limit screen capture. If screenshot mode shows a black frame, try a native package build.

FAQ

Does this work on Wayland?

Generally yes in current Chromium builds, but it depends on your compositor and portal setup. Screenshot mode, which uses the screen-share portal, is the most reliable fallback.

Is it better than gpick?

Different trade-off. gpick has more palette tooling. This site needs no install, behaves the same on every distro, and gives you OKLCH output, which most Linux pickers don't.

Does anything get uploaded?

No. The browser returns only the sampled color to the page, and your palette lives in localStorage on your machine.

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