Color Picker Plugin for Notepad++

Made for programmers and web developers, Color Picker Plugin for Notepad++ is a small-sized plugin that provides you with color dialogs to easily insert colors into your source code without having to use external applications. It's part of the "Notepad++ Plugins" pack.

The tool supports HTML, Delphi, C++, Visual Basic and RGB colors codes, as well as the integer format. It includes two types of color palettes and a table for finding out how colors are named and what they codes are in Delphi.

Setting up the extension doesn't take long, since there is no third-party software involved, like .NET Framework. You just have to open the downloaded archive, extract the DLL file, and copy it to the "plugins" directory where you have Notepad++.

This works whether you have an installer or portable edition of the program available. After firing up Notepad++ (restart it if it was already launched), you can access Color Picker from the "Plugins" menu.

In the add-on's main window, you can click and drag three sliders to set the red, green and channel values of a color to determine its codes (or set the numerical RGB values).

The string form can be chosen from HTML, Delphi, C++, Visual Basic, integer and RGB (triple). There's also a button available for inverting the current color, which can be previewed while moving the sliders.

Moreover, you can access two types of color dialogs, depending on which one you're most familiarized with for choosing colors from the spectrum.

The first type is the classical Windows color dialog which shows basic colors and allows you to make a list with custom ones. The second color dialog displays the hexadecimal code of any selected color.

Once you click "Ok", Color Picker Plugin inserts the color code in the selected string form at the mouse cursor's current position. The color names in Delphi can be examined in a table that contains color previews, values, meanings and hex codes. It's quite a short list, though.

This is where the plugin's functionality ends. Considering its name, we expected to find a color picker that allowed us to choose any color from the screen using the mouse instead of having to look it up in the color palette.

It would've also been useful if it had a feature for making code conversions between the string forms. Too bad that it cannot be embedded in the main window of Notepad++ as a separate pane, which would had made it possible to seamlessly toggle the plugin and text document instead of exiting the plugin's window to be able to return to the source.