FineFindus
Allow picking color of inactive windows
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Some applications have inactive window colour features. For example, in VSCode, you can use different colours when the window is focused, or it is in the background. When I use the Eyedropper, I can not get the active window colour of the applications since they change their colour to their inactive window colour because Eyedropper is focused. I try "Alt Tab" combinations (or Super + Tab) it does not work.
Describe the solution you'd like I should able to change the active windows to the application that I want the colour from while using Eyedropper with "Alt+Tab" shortcut.
Describe alternatives you've considered N/A
Additional context N/A
This has been brought up before, unfortunately I don't think this is possible since the color picker itself is not managed by Eyedropper. A possible solution would be to add a timeout until the color picker is activated, but this is neither reliable nor does it work with the current workflow. I'm open to (and happy about) other solutions. The best workaround I know right now is to take a screenshot of the window and pick the color from it.
Some potential solutions that might be sufficient:
- Allow picking based on desktop coordinates. This could allow you to keep Eyedropper as the active window, and pick from inactive windows and avoid things where cursor hover changes the UI.
- Allow defining or importing/exporting (named?) color sets. Then possibly provide a builtin color set based on Adwaita.
Picking UI element colors from apps has been one of my most common use cases for this app, so I've ran into this same issue, and I used the screenshot solution you described.
Regardless of workarounds, I think having color sets would also be useful on its own. This would be nice for editing various themes or color schemes, especially if you could also add new colors to a scheme based on the existing palettes feature. Could be useful for making palettes akin to how Material You works on Android.
Allow picking based on desktop coordinates. This could allow you to keep Eyedropper as the active window, and pick from inactive windows and avoid things where cursor hover changes the UI.
The color picker portal does not currently allow for that.
Allow defining or importing/exporting (named?) color sets. Then possibly provide a builtin color set based on Adwaita.
I'm not sure how this would solve the problem?