Building a palette

Palette mode lets you create and edit collections of up to 256 colors, arranged in any order. Add colors by sampling your screen, entering values, extracting them from photographs, or bringing them in from other Suisai windows.

Unlike harmonies and ramps, Palette mode doesn’t calculate colors from starting seeds. Each swatch is yours to add, edit, name, and arrange.

Starting from nothing

A new palette opens as a small card with four ways to get started:

• Sample from screen: Open the macOS sampling loupe and pick a color.
• Type or paste values: Enter HEX, rgb(), or oklch() values, one per line.
• Extract from an image: Choose a photograph or drop a file onto the window.
• Open from the Library: Select an existing palette from your collection.

Once you’ve added your first colors, the window expands to its working size.

Harmony and ramp windows have a simpler starting card. Rather than assembling individual swatches, you choose the colors that Suisai will use as seeds. The controls and number of generated colors depend on the selected mode.

List and Tiles views

Suisai provides two ways to display a palette.

List shows each swatch as a horizontal color strip, with its HEX value and name alongside it.

Tiles arranges swatches in a grid, making it easier to browse larger palettes without scrolling through a long list.

The List/Tiles toggle appears in the footer when a palette grows taller than its window. When all the colors fit comfortably in List view, the toggle isn’t needed.

Both views use the same window, and switching between them doesn’t change its position.

Opening and naming a swatch

Each palette row has two parts:

• The color swatch on the left. Click to copy the color to your clipboard in your currently selected code format.
• The information area on the right. Click to expand the row and see the color’s details and editing controls. Click again to collapse it.

Double-clicking the color name lets you set or edit the name you give that color.

When expanded, the row displays the color’s name and values, including HEX, RGB or RGBA, HSL, LAB, OKLCH, and CMYK.

Suisai also gives every color a name. Names already stored in a palette file are preserved. Otherwise, Suisai finds the nearest match from a collection of 31,914 names, using OKLab to compare perceptual color differences.

Give a color your own name

Double-click a swatch’s name to edit it. You can rename it directly in a collapsed row, in the expanded card, or through Rename Swatch in the context menu.

Custom names stay attached to their swatches when you change the color, save the palette, or export it.

Automatically matched names work differently: when you change the color, Suisai updates the name to match the new value.

This means you can give a swatch a permanent name such as Brand Blue or --brand-blue without having it replaced when you fine-tune the color.

That difference is the whole of it. A name is either a decision or a description, and Suisai only overwrites descriptions.

For stylesheet work, Suisai also understands names with prefixes such as --ink, $ink, and @ink. It preserves the intended prefix rather than adding it a second time during export.

Keyboard editing

↑ and ↓ walk the palette, opening each swatch in turn and closing the one behind it, with ← and → doing the same in Tiles. Home and End go to the first and the last.

Press A over a swatch to open its editing controls, and Tab to move through them. While the sliders are up the arrows move whichever control has the keyboard rather than walking the swatches, so nothing shifts under you by accident.

Four keys act on whichever swatch you are hovering, or the selected one if you are hovering nothing: B sends it to the Color Bench, C sends it to Nōtan, T tears it off into a window of its own, and ⌫ removes it. Pressing B or C again removes the color from the Bench or Nōtan, so either key is a way in and a way back out.

See Keyboard shortcuts for the complete set of commands.

Editing colors

Expand a swatch to adjust it using RGB, HSB, HSL, or CMYK controls.

Each color space provides numeric fields and sliders, alongside a visual picker. Choose between the square spectrum and the color wheel with its triangular picker. Press W to switch between picker styles.

You can also use the macOS system color panel. When a slider has keyboard focus, the arrow keys adjust its value one step at a time.

CMYK editing includes a warning when the selected color falls outside the printable gamut. Suisai alerts you without preventing the edit.

Transparency

Every editing color space includes an A slider for alpha, allowing you to adjust a swatch’s transparency.

Transparency can also come from values you enter or import, including Apple color lists that support alpha.

Transparent swatches are displayed against a checkerboard so they can be distinguished from opaque colors. Their values use formats such as eight-digit HEX and RGBA, and copying a color preserves its alpha where the selected output format supports it.

The Color Bench mixes opaque colors. If you send a transparent swatch to the Bench, it arrives as an opaque color; the original swatch and its transparency remain unchanged in the palette.

See Copying and exporting for how Suisai handles transparency in file formats that don’t support alpha.

Arranging colors

Drag a swatch within a palette to change its position. An outline shows where the swatch will be placed when you release it.

Use ⌫ to remove the open swatch. ⌘K clears the palette’s colors while keeping its name and its file; the same command is File → Clear Palette, which names whichever window is in front, so it reads Clear Bench or Clear Contrast there.

Undo (⌘Z) and Redo (⇧⌘Z) are available for changes such as editing, rearranging, adding, and removing colors.

Moving colors between windows

You can drag swatches directly between Suisai windows.

Drag a color from one palette to another to copy it. Hold ⌘ while dropping to move the swatch instead, removing it from the original palette.

Colors also move between palettes and the Color Bench. Drag a palette swatch onto the Bench, or drag a Bench color back into a palette.

In Suisai 1.1, you can also send colors directly to Nōtan for contrast checking, without copying and pasting their values.

Duplicate colors

When you add a color that already exists in a palette, Suisai doesn’t automatically add a second identical swatch.

Instead, it displays a notification identifying the existing color and reveals that swatch in the palette.

Duplicate detection uses exact HEX values. If you intentionally want more than one swatch with the same color, choose Duplicate Swatch from the context menu.

The swatch menu

Right-click a swatch to access its available actions.

You don’t always need the context menu. Click a swatch to copy its color in the active format, or drag it into another application that accepts color data.

See Copying and exporting for more about clipboard formats and dragging colors into other applications.

Getting the palette out

You can export the entire palette from the button at the bottom-right corner of its window.

Choose a standard palette file, a code or data format, or a PNG image, depending on where you want to use the colors.

You can also drag the palette from its footer, where it displays PALETTE · N COLORS, to create a file in the format used for your most recent export.

New untitled palettes receive a name when saved. Palettes opened from existing files retain their names and file formats.

See Copying and exporting for the available output options, or Files and formats for information about saving and opening palette files.