Color History

Keeps every color you pick with hyprpicker, ready to copy back as hex, rgb() or hsl(). An Omarchy 4 shell plugin.

SUPER+PRINT picks a color exactly as it did before — the hex still lands on your clipboard — and now also records it.

Once you have picked something, a swatch of that color appears in the bar next to wifi and sound. Click it (or press SUPER+SHIFT+PRINT) and the history drops down from the bar like those panels do: newest first, one row per color, swatch on the left and the value beside it. With no history the widget hides itself entirely, and the bar closes the gap.

Requirements

Omarchy 4 (Quattro) and its Quickshell bar. Everything the plugin calls ships with Omarchy's base install, so there is nothing extra to package:

Beyond those, pick.sh uses only pkill, grep, tail and date. There are no bundled binaries, no network access, and no runtime downloads.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/<you>/colorhistory.git --enable
omarchy restart shell

The restart is not optional. Services are mounted when the shell starts, so a freshly installed plugin's keybindings do not exist until it comes back up — omarchy plugin add alone leaves you with a plugin that is enabled and inert.

Check it took:

hyprctl binds -j | jq -r '.[] | select(.description|test("Color")) | .description'
# Color picker
# Color history

Remove

omarchy plugin remove io.github.arcanavox.colorhistory
omarchy restart shell

The restart matters: the keybindings live in Hyprland's runtime, not on disk, so SUPER+PRINT keeps running the plugin's pick.sh until the shell comes back and stops re-registering it. After the restart your own config is authoritative again and SUPER+PRINT returns to whatever it was before.

Nothing outside the plugin's own directory is modified, so removal leaves no edits to clean up. Two state files remain if you want them gone:

rm -f ~/.local/state/omarchy/color-history.tsv \
      ~/.local/state/omarchy/color-history-format

Using it

Where things live

~/.local/state/omarchy/color-history.tsv, one line per pick:

1756200000	#FF0044
1756200041	#22CC88	*

Append-only from the picker's side; a third column marks a star. The format preference sits next to it in color-history-format.

Every read and write of those two files goes through safeio.py, which opens with O_NOFOLLOW and O_NONBLOCK, refuses anything that is not an ordinary file, and caps how much it will read. They are predictable paths in a directory anything running as you can write to, and the shell that reads them stays up for days — a pipe planted at one of them would otherwise hang that shell, and a symlink would aim the writes at another of your files. Delete either file to start over — nothing else on your system is touched.

The bar widget is the panel: SUPER+SHIFT+PRINT reaches it over IPC, so the widget has to be placed in your bar for the keybinding to have anything to open. omarchy plugin add --enable puts it there; omarchy plugin disable takes it out again.

What it does not catch

Colors picked by running hyprpicker yourself in a terminal, or from the Omarchy menu's Capture → Color row, are not recorded. Only the keybinding routes through this plugin.

To record the menu row too, reuse its id in ~/.config/omarchy/extensions/omarchy-menu.jsonc:

"trigger.capture.color": {
  "icon": "󰃉",
  "label": "Color",
  "action": "~/.config/omarchy/plugins/io.github.arcanavox.colorhistory/pick.sh"
}

Keybindings

The plugin registers its two binds through hyprctl eval when the shell starts, rather than editing ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua. (hyprctl keyword is refused under Omarchy's Lua config parser — "keyword can't work with non-legacy parsers" — and it exits 0 while refusing, so anything built on it fails silently.) Nothing is written to your config, and removing the plugin needs no cleanup — but the binds do stay live until the next shell restart after you disable it.

It does take SUPER+PRINT over from Omarchy's default color-picker binding — that is the point, since that binding is what records a pick — but it does so in Hyprland's runtime only. No file of yours is edited, and a shell restart after removal hands the key straight back.

To put them somewhere else, unbind and rebind in your own bindings.lua; your config loads after the plugin, so it wins:

hl.unbind("SUPER + PRINT")
o.bind("SUPER + F12", "Color picker", "~/.config/omarchy/plugins/io.github.arcanavox.colorhistory/pick.sh")

Tests

./test.sh        # pick.sh against a stubbed hyprpicker
node --test      # the parse/dedup/star/format model