pastel

pastel is a color utility CLI for converting color formats, generating palettes, and previewing or styling colors in the terminal. It is aimed at shell workflows where color values need to be inspected, transformed, or embedded in terminal output.

• Convert colors between named colors, hex, RGB, HSL, Lab, OkLab or OkLCh, CMYK, ANSI, and channel-specific numeric values.
• Generate random, gradient, or visually distinct palettes, then sort, mix, lighten, darken, rotate, or otherwise transform them in shell pipelines.
• Pick a screen color, choose a readable foreground with textcolor, and print ANSI-colored labels or status text from scripts.

• Most subcommands are non-interactive, accept values from args or stdin, and emit one result per line, which works well in inspect-transform pipelines.
• Output is plain text or ANSI-colored text rather than JSON, so agents need command-specific parsing and should avoid colorized views when exact values matter.
• Best for local design, theming, docs, or terminal UX automation; it is less useful for workflows centered on remote services or structured APIs.

• pick depends on an external color picker or the macOS built-in picker, so that path introduces a human step and desktop dependency.
• Some commands render richer previews only when stdout is a TTY; automation should prefer explicit formatting commands like format for stable output.