Shell command to get color under mouse cursor (xorg)

Question

I need to get the color in hex code of the pixel beneath my mouse cursor. There are plenty fancy GUI-tools to solve this task, but I need a simple command line way to get the color, so that I can use the solution in a shell script.

Possibly I could use ImageMagick to take a (one pixel?) screenshot and extract the color from it (I can fetch the position using xdotool)). Maybe there is a simpler solution.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Not really satisfied with the other solution, I tried my ImageMagick idea. Works fine for me! (Depends on xclip, ImageMagick, xdotool, notify-send)

#!/bin/sh
# Get hex rgb color under mouse cursor, put it into clipboard and create a
# notification.

eval $(xdotool getmouselocation --shell)
IMAGE=`import -window root -depth 8 -crop 1x1+$X+$Y txt:-`
COLOR=`echo $IMAGE | grep -om1 '#\w\+'`
echo -n $COLOR | xclip -i -selection CLIPBOARD
notify-send "Color under mouse cursor: " $COLOR

EDIT:

Now using Gnome Shell, I have problems with the above solution (import won't take a screenshot of the visible windows, I don't know why. Hints are welcome). An alternative is to use a (fast) screenshot taker like scrot and use convert instead of import:

#!/bin/sh
# Get hex rgb color under mouse cursor, put it into clipboard and create a
# notification.

scrot --overwrite /tmp/copycolor.png
eval $(xdotool getmouselocation --shell)
IMAGE=`convert /tmp/copycolor.png -depth 8 -crop 1x1+$X+$Y txt:-`
COLOR=`echo $IMAGE | grep -om1 '#\w\+'`
echo -n $COLOR | xclip -i -selection CLIPBOARD
notify-send "Color under mouse cursor: " $COLOR

Update 2020: Newer versions of scrot require the "--overwrite" option to be set for this to work.

Answer 2

Sure you can. But you need another linux package. If you're on Ubuntu just issue:

sudo apt-get install xdotool grabc

Then run grabc but background it

grabc &

Then perform a mouseclick using xdotool

xdotool click 1

The click will be captured by grabc's cursor and the background process will output the color.

But maybe it won't work from a script. For that purposes you might want to look at this topic on the Ubuntu forums.

Or if you don't mind, you can do it with python as described here.