Put a color preview next to the swatch

A little papercut, whem picking a color (say, for the window border) I will not be able to tell what color it is precisely - only with the color under the circle in each bar.

It would be nice if there’s a color preview next to the picker so I can clearly see the final color - like on the color theme settings, but e.g. on the background settings.

(I’ll post this on the bugtracker after gathering opinions here)

Hi Parnikkapore, welcome!

I’m not quite sure what you mean. There’s a colour well in the Appearance setting that shows the colour set with the RGB sliders. Also, the interface like the window border changes live while twiddling the sliders.

Oh, maybe I understand you now… :slight_smile:
You’d like to have a colour widget in the Backgrounds preferences as they already are in the Appearance|Color preferences, right?

Yup! A color well like in Appearances>Color, but in stuff like Backgrounds. Originally, I wanted it to be added to the color picker component itself though.

Not sure such an optional preview can be added before Haiku R2 to BColorControl, but you can file an enhancement at our bugtracker.

In the specific case of Backgrounds, such a preview beside the colour sliders isn’t actually needed, because there already is a preview that shows the set colour, if there isn’t a background set already.

Sure it can, BColorControl already is a “shapeshifter” control that looks completely different in 8bit than true color modes. However, in most cases you would have the color apply live to something, which I think is what we zould rather encourage. Previewing the color in a box on its own isn’t that much helpful, showing it in context with something makes more sense, I think?

We may tweak the look of the slider knobs in BColorControl to have more space for the preview there, however. Currently it has a single pixel at the middle showing the exact color, which is not very helpful.

If the element you are changing colour is not visible you’d rather have two options: have a box with plain colour or have a preview of the element or part of it. This second option could be enforced through the user interface guidelines.

Yes, that is something for the user interface guidelines rather than changing the widget itself. However I will also have a look at improving the widget so that the selected color is more visible there, by making the knob of the sliders larger and putting the preview inside them

On the topic of background settings, if you have a fullscreen image up as your background, you can’t see the live color preview anywhere. Only the workspaces replicant provides real-time feedback in this case.