GNOME Color Browser manual
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# Using GNOME Color Browser

`GNOME Color Browser` is used for manipulating palettes, i.e. collections of screen colors. It allows you to browse the system palette (list of colors that come pre-defined with your system), define and edit your own palettes, select a color from any of these palettes to be used by an application, or find best matches for a given color in these palettes.

`GNOME Color Browser` can also be used to define new colors; however, it only makes sense to do so if you plan on using this color many times. In this case, you can use `GNOME Color Browser` to define a new color and add it to your personal palette. If you only want to use a color once, it is easier to use the default GNOME Color Selector.

## Working with multiple documents

The main `GNOME Color Browser` window may contain several sub-windows ("views"). Each of these views shows either a contents of a palette (system or your personal one) or a search window, used for finding matching colors. For example, in the default configuration `GNOME Color Browser` starts with 4 views: two showing the system palette (one listing colors by name, the other using small color squares to represent them), a view of the users palette (originally empty), and a search window. Having multiple views can be very convenient if you want to work with several palettes at the same time, use drag and drop to move a color from one palette to another, etc.

To switch between views, click on the views tab at the top (provided that you are using default GTK theme) of the window. If there are too many open views so that the tabs do not fit the screen, you will see 2 arrows at the top right of `GNOME Color Browser` window; these arows allow you to scroll through the tabs.

Every time you open a new view, a new sub-window is added to the existing ones. To close a view, select File->Close->Close view or click on the Close in the toolbar. If you have several views showing the same document, you can close all of them by selecting File->Close->Close document (do not forget to save it first if you made any changes). Finally, you can also drag a view tab out of `GNOME Color Browser` window; this will create a new `GNOME Color Browser` window, showing this view.

## Using a color for an application

Once you have found a color you like, there are two ways you can use this color in an application. The easiest way is to utilize drag and drop: all the color bars you see in the `GNOME Color Browser` window can be drag-and-dropped onto any GNOME component which has configurable colors. For example, you can drag a color onto GNOME Panel to change Panel's background color, or onto `GNOME Terminal` to change its background.

You can also use the color with many X Window applications which are not GNOME-compliant, for example with `emacs` text editor. Most of X applications accept command line options -bg `COLOR` and -fg `COLOR` to specify the background and foreground color. `COLOR` can be either a system color name, as shown by `GNOME Color Browser` or its description by a triple of numbers, Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) values. For example, the command

    	  emacs -bg lightblue -fg darkgreen

will start `emacs` with light blue background and dark green foreground. Note that contrary to common UNIX conventions, color names are case-insensitive. More information about colors in X Window System, RGB values, color depth, etc. is given in the section called Colors in X Window System.

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