Clint Rutkas of Microsoft has announced a new PowerToys module called “color picker” that will allow web developers to select the specific color that is below the cursor. The tool will arrive later this month with the release of PowerToys version 0.20, and it will also bring tons of bug fixes.
0.20 #powertoys will bring on a lot of fixes and a new toy, a screen color picker. Eta July 31st
— Clint Rutkas (@ClintRutkas) July 23, 2020
The color picker module will appear on the main PowerToys UI (as shown in the screenshot below), and users will also be able to access it with a dedicated hotkey. Once activated, the tool will let users quickly measure the hex color values on their screens and display the corresponding RGB values.
Microsoft detailed the basic functionality of this tool on its GitHub forum in the following manner:
- Color picker appears when activation shortcut pressed (configurable in the settings)
- Color picker follows the mouse cursor and shows the actual color that is below the cursor
- Scroll up will cause Zoom Window to open for a better color picking precision
- Left mouse click will copy that color into a clipboard in a predefined format (setting)
- Changes cursor when picking a color (can be turned off)
- Color picker is multimonitor/multi DPI aware. It respect monitors’ boundaries and stays always in the view (predefined safe zones in top, bottom, left, right sides of a monitor)
- Added the new section into Settings
- Updated installer to contain required files
Overall, the native color picker is a welcome change for UX designer/UWP developers who need to extract colors out of images quite often. Many other third-party tools already offer the color picker support, so it’s nice to see Microsoft’s PowerToys utility finally catching up. We invite you to check out the GitHub page to learn more about this feature.
