PowerToys to get a redesigned colour Picker, here is an early look

A couple of days ago, Microsoft revealed a redesigned PowerToys Run launcherwith Windows 11-like aesthetics and new features. As it turned out, Run is not the only tool to get a fresh coat of paint. Microsoft published an early preview of the upcoming PowerToys colour Picker rework.

PowerToys colour Picker is a neat utility that, as the name implies, lets you get colour codes in different formats, such as HEX, RGB, HSL, HSV, and plenty of others. In addition, PowerToys generates a palette containing similar to the select colour tones. You can invoke PowerToys' colour Picker by pressing Win + Shift + C (almost all PowerToys shortcuts are customizable) and get colour from any pixel on the screen.

After the colour Picker is activated, hover your mouse cursor over the colour you would like to copy and left-click the mouse button to select a colour. If you want to see the area under your cursor in more detail, scroll up to zoom in.

The copied colour will be stored in your clipboard in the format that is configured in the settings (default: HEX).

The editor lets you see the history of (up to 20) picked colours and copy their representation in any predefined string format. In PowerToys Settings, you can configure which colour formats are visible in the editor and in what order that they appear.

A pull request published on PowerToys' GitHub repository describes the proposed change:

This PR moves colourPicker off ModernWpf to WpfUI and introducing a fresh new UX, inline with the Windows 11 design language.

You can see how the current UI compares with what is to come:

Old vs new

And here is the new version in action:

PowerToys is an open-source set of utilities for Windows 10 and 11, which means every user with the necessary skills can contribute to the project's development on GitHub. As for regular customers with no dev knowledge, they can get PowerToys from its GitHub repository, the Microsoft Store, or winget.

Source