xmcolor

Compilation Instructions

The code can be found here: https://codeberg.org/x11cp/x11cp.git

git clone https://codeberg.org/x11cp/x11cp.git && cd x11cp/src/xmcolor

Direct compilation

To compile this application, the following command should be used:

xmkmf -a && make

Toplevel Makefile

There is also a wrapper command in the top-level `Makefile` of the repository where this is can be run as:

make xmcolor

The following libraries/dependencies are also required. The names of these will vary from each Linux distribution/BSD, hence the names of these libraries are generically specified:

About

NOTE: this application requires an 8-bit color depth display to run.

This will mean running this inside a Xephyr session

xmcolor is the Motif Color Picker, written by Ti Kan. I believe this was written sometime in 1994. The embedded ident marker indicates: @(#)xmcolor.c 1.11 94/12/05

This was developed using Xt and motif, and provides a means of mixing one’s own colours, as well as using pre-defined colours from rgb.txt. One could then select the hexadecimal string for that colour.

I really like how simple and self-contained so many of these applications were, and how much of a teaching aid it meant for someone to write them. The source file has 1066 lines in it – quite a lot when you consider how much of that is Xt/Xm boilerplate.

These days, you’d just use a colour-picker from google without giving it a second thought.

Screenshots