Using GNOME Color Browser

GNOME Color Browser is used for manipulating palettes, i.e. collections of screen colors. It allows you to browse the system palette (list of colors that come pre-defined with your system), define and edit your own palettes, select a color from any of these palettes to be used by an application, or find best matches for a given color in these palettes.

GNOME Color Browser can also be used to define new colors; however, it only makes sense to do so if you plan on using this color many times. In this case, you can use GNOME Color Browser to define a new color and add it to your personal palette. If you only want to use a color once, it is easier to use the default GNOME Color Selector.

Working with multiple documents

The main GNOME Color Browser window may contain several sub-windows ("documents"). There are 2 types of documents: palette documents, showing system or your personal palette, and search documents, used for finding matching colors. For example, in the default configuration GNOME Color Browser starts with 4 documents: two showing the system palette (one listing colors by name, the other using small color squares to represent them), and two search documents. Having multiple documents 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 documents, click on the document tab at the bottom of the window. If there are too many open documents so that the tabs do not fit the screen, you will see 2 arrows at the bottom left of GNOME Color Browser window; these arows allow you to scroll through the tabs.

Every time you open a new palette (using FileOpen), it is opened as a new document. To close a document, select FileClose (do not forget to save it first if you made any changes). Finally, you can also drag a document tab out of GNOME Color Browser window; this will create a new GNOME Color Browser window, showing this document.

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.