Re: Gamut is a native X11 color-engineering tool for Linux

dummy@example.com (liquibyte) — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 21:01:11 +0000

Sorry folks, had it set to private accidentally.

Gamut is a native X11 color-engineering tool for Linux

dummy@example.com (liquibyte) — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 19:51:04 +0000

This is a project that started about 10 years ago that morphed from a simple color picker that didn't pull in an entire desktop worth of libraries to just run into a useful color tool for graphics artists, web designers, UI designers, and programmers. I wrote my own toolkit for this purpose and incorporated WPEWebkit for a drag and drop browser and code from compton for a built in compositor to have a measurement overlay that has true transparency and click through behavior to the underlying windows and desktop.

Give it a try and let me know what you think. I'd eventually like to have this in the repos but only if people think it's useful and unique enough to package.

From the README:

Gamut

Gamut is a native X11 color-engineering tool for Linux. It provides a
precision color picker, a multi-model harmony generator, a gradient builder
with perceptual interpolation, a full-screen measurement overlay, and a live
web-design preview — all in a single compact application built without GTK,
Qt, or any large widget toolkit.

Everything is built on Xtk, a self-contained C17 Xlib widget library
written for this project, with LCMS2 for ICC-accurate conversions and
WPEWebKit 2 for the embedded browser.

Version: 1.0.0-rc1 (see CHANGELOG.md)
License: Artistic License 2.0 (see LICENSE)

Install and runtime dependencies:

# Dependencies

Direct dependencies are what Gamut compiles and links against (see
`Makefile`: pkg-config packages plus explicit `-l` libraries). Indirect
dependencies are pulled in through WPE WebKit and are listed for
completeness — they are not referenced by Gamut's own code.

## Core C / POSIX

-   glibc (also provides libm and libdl, both linked explicitly)
-   libpthread (XRecord pointer/key thread, LCMS2 threaded plugin)

## Linux Kernel Interfaces

-   linux-headers (`linux/input-event-codes.h`, `linux/memfd.h` in the
    WPE backend IPC)

## GLib Ecosystem

-   glib-2.0
-   gobject-2.0

## OpenGL

-   libGL / GLX (measurement-overlay compositor)
-   EGL (custom WPE backend)
-   GLESv2 (custom WPE backend)
-   mesa (or another provider of the above)

## X11 Stack

-   libX11 (includes XKB via `X11/XKBlib.h`)
-   libXext (DBE double-buffering, XShm, Shape)
-   libXrender
-   libXrandr (multi-monitor geometry)
-   libXfixes
-   libXdamage
-   libXcomposite (overlay compositor redirection)
-   libXtst (XRecord — overlay pointer/key capture)
-   libXft
-   libXpm

## WPE WebKit (Design Window browser)

-   WPE WebKit (wpe-webkit-2.0)
-   libwpe (wpe-1.0)
-   libsoup-3.0 (build-time: in wpe-webkit-2.0's pkg-config Requires)

Gamut ships its own WPE backend (`wpe-backend/headless.c` →
`libWPEBackend-gamut.so`); wpebackend-fdo is **not** used.

## Color Management

-   lcms2 (with fast_float and threaded plugins)

## Fonts

-   fontconfig
-   freetype

## Indirect (via WPE WebKit, runtime only)

-   gio-2.0

Screenshots

Dev1 Galaxy Forum / Gamut is a native X11 color-engineering tool for Linux

Re: Gamut is a native X11 color-engineering tool for Linux

Gamut is a native X11 color-engineering tool for Linux