Preview any color in your buffer in real time.

🎨 colorful-mode is a minor mode that allow you highlight/preview any color format such as color hex and color names, in your current buffer in real time and in a user friendly way based/inspired on 🌈rainbow-mode.el.

• Real time color highlight.
• Supports hexadecimals colors, color names, rgb[a]/hsl[a] and LaTex colors (gray, rbg, RGB, HTML)
• Convert current color at point to other formats such as hexadecimal or color names (only available for some colors).
• Optionally use a prefix/suffix string instead highlight.
• Optionally highlight colors only inside in strings.
• Omitting color keywords from being highlighted.

With prefix instead highlight.

With a custom prefix (in this example a custom character).

• colorful-allow-mouse-clicks (default: t) If non-nil, allow using mouse buttons for change color.
• colorful-use-prefix (default: nil) If non-nil, use prefix for preview color instead highlight them. NOTE: css derived modes by default colorize rgb and hex colors, this may interfere with colorful prefix, you can disable this setting css-fontify-colors to nil
• colorful-prefix-string (default: "●") String to be used in highlights. Only relevant if `colorful-use-prefix’ is non-nil.
• colorful-prefix-alignment (default: 'left) The position to put prefix string. The value can be left or right. Only relevant if `colorful-use-prefix’ is non-nil.
• colorful-extra-color-keyword-functions default: ‘((emacs-lisp-mode . colorful-add-color-names) ((mhtml-mode html-ts-mode css-mode css-ts-mode) . (colorful-add-rgb-colors colorful-add-hsl-colors colorful-add-color-names)) (latex-mode . colorful-add-latex-colors) colorful-add-hex-colors) List of functions to add extra color keywords to colorful-color-keywords.

  It can be a cons cell specifying the mode (or a list of modes) e.g:

  (((css-mode css-ts-mode) . colorful-add-rgb-colors) (emacs-lisp-mode . (colorful-add-color-names colorful-add-rgb-colors)) ((text-mode html-mode) . (colorful-add-color-names colorful-add-rgb-colors)) …)

  Or a simple list of functions for executing wherever colorful is active: (colorful-add-color-names colorful-add-rgb-colors)

  Available functions are:

  • colorful-add-hex-colors.
  • colorful-add-color-names.
  • colorful-add-rgb-colors.
  • colorful-add-hsl-colors.
  • colorful-add-latex-colors
• colorful-exclude-colors (default: '("#def")) List of keyword to don’t highlight.
• colorful-short-hex-conversions (default: 2) If set to 2, hex values converted by colorful should be as short as possible. Setting this to 2 will make hex values follow a 24-bit specification and can make them inaccurate.
• colorful-only-strings (default: nil) If non-nil colorful will only highlight colors inside strings. If set to only-prog, only highlight colors in strings if current major mode is derived from prog-mode.
• global-colorful-modes (default: '(mhtml-mode html-ts-mode scss-mode css-mode css-ts-mode prog-mode)) Which major modes global-colorful-mode is switched on in (globally).

• colorful-base Face used as base for highlight color names. Only used for draw box and change font &c., changing box color and/or background/foreground color face doesn’t have effect.

• colorful-change-or-copy-color Change or copy color to a converted format at current cursor position.
• colorful-convert-and-change-color Convert color to a valid format and replace color at current cursor position.
• colorful-convert-and-copy-color Convert color to a valid format and copy it at current cursor position.
• colorful-mode Buffer-local minor mode.
• global-colorful-mode Global minor mode.

These key bindings are defined by: colorful-mode-map

• C-x c x → colorful-change-or-copy-color.
• C-x c c → colorful-convert-and-copy-color.
• C-x c r → colorful-convert-and-change-color.

Colorful by default provides extra functions that highlight additional colors:

• colorful-add-hex-colors Add Hexadecimal Colors.
• colorful-add-color-names Add color names.
• colorful-add-rgb-colors Add CSS RGB colors.
• colorful-add-hsl-colors Add CSS HSL colors.
• colorful-add-latex-colors Add LaTex rgb/RGB/HTML/Grey colors.

For use them add it to:

;; In this example add emacs color names only for yaml-mode and derived.
  (add-to-list 'colorful-extra-color-keyword-functions '(yaml-mode . colorful-add-color-names))

See: colorful-extra-color-keyword-functions for more details.

It’s recommended that you must use emacs-28.x or higher.

For install colorful run:

• M-x package-install colorful-mode

Once you have it installed you can run colorful locally in your buffer with M-x colorful-mode, if want enable it globally without using hooks then you can do M-x global-colorful-mode

Or if you prefer using use-package macro:

(use-package colorful-mode
  :ensure t ; Optional
  :hook (prog-mode text-mode)
  ...)

colorful-mode improves rainbow-mode in adding more features and fixing some (and old) bugs:

[1] rainbow-mode (like colorful) uses regex for highlight some
    keywords, however it cannot exclude specifics colors keywords
    (such as "#def" that overrides C "#define" keyword).
[2] Only for some colors.
[3] I didn't a benchmark however due colorful-mode uses overlays
    instead text properties it can be a bit slow.

The intention is to provide a featured alternative to rainbow-mode.el with a user-friendly approach.

If you prefer only highlights without color conversion, prefix/suffix string indicator and/or anything else you can use rainbow-mode.el.

On the other hand, if you want convert colors, overlays, optional prefix strings and more features you can use colorful-mode.el.

colorful-mode is part of GNU ELPA, if you want send patches you will need assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation. Please see the CONTRIBUTING.org file for getting more information.