The Palette Library

⇧⌘L opens the Palette Library: every palette Suisai can see, wherever it lives.

Where palettes come from

• Folders you choose to watch. Suisai keeps a security-scoped bookmark for each, so it can read the folder in later sessions without asking again. Each appears either as the folder name or under a nickname you give it.
• macOS system colour lists, if you want them included. That takes in every list in ~/Library/Colors, the Mac’s own colour-list folder, and the one Install in Colour Picker… writes to.

Suisai keeps no library of its own

There’s no private Suisai folder your palettes disappear into, and that’s deliberate. A palette installed to the colour picker lands in the folder macOS already uses, so it turns up in the colour panel of every application on the machine at the same moment it turns up here.

The Library is a view onto where your palettes already live. Nothing has to be imported, and nothing is locked to this app. If you stop using Suisai tomorrow, every palette you made stays exactly where it’s and every other app keeps reading it.

Palettes you open from elsewhere keep their own home: edit one and save, and it goes back where it came from, in the format it arrived in. ~/Library/Colors is the default for palettes you build here, not a place everything is funnelled into.

Two exceptions are worth knowing. A .aco can’t be written back. And Install in Colour Picker… doesn’t move a palette. It writes a .clr copy into ~/Library/Colors and leaves the original exactly where it was, but the window you’re working in follows the copy from then on, so a later ⌘S goes to the list rather than the file you opened. Files and formats sets out where each case saves to.

The Palette menu

The Library is the full view. For getting to a palette quickly there’s the menu on the palette name, in the window header, which lists everything the Library can see without opening it.

• New Palette starts an empty one.
• SYSTEM holds macOS’s own lists (Apple, Crayons, System, Web Safe Colors) and anything else installed in ~/Library/Colors, including Suisai’s own Washi and Sumi themes. Anything you install to the colour picker appears here too.
• One group per watched location, under the nickname you gave it.
• Palette Library… opens the full window.

Every entry reads name · count. A location holding more than twelve palettes collapses into a submenu of its own, titled the same way, so the menu stays a menu. Twelve or fewer are listed in place.

The same list is on the menu bar’s Palette menu under Load Palette, alongside New Palette, Add Harmony to Palette, Install in Colour Picker…, Export, Rescan Palette Folders and Reveal Colour Lists in Finder.

Formats it reads

Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase), Photoshop Colour Swatches (.aco), GIMP Palette (.gpl) and Apple Colour List (.clr).

Finding one

Search by name, across every section at once. While you’re typing, every match is shown whatever is folded away, and the header counts them.

Sort by name or by swatch count. The header’s label switches between the two, and the chevron beside it both shows the direction and flips it: A–Z with the chevron down, Z–A with it up.

Changing the key resets the direction to its natural one: names run A to Z, sizes run largest first. Both choices are remembered between launches.

Each row previews the palette’s colours and counts them.

Long sections

A section holding more than eight palettes opens showing its first five, with an N more… row at the foot. Click that for the whole section, and Show fewer at the end folds it back. Eight or fewer is always shown in full, so a small location is never hidden behind a click.

Which sections you left open is remembered per location, between launches.

Searching ignores all of this. While you’re typing, every match appears whether its section was folded or not.

Opening a row

Click a row and it expands to show every colour in the palette with its hex and its name, and names the file it came from, or system colour list for one of those. Two actions sit at the bottom:

• Load into Builder opens the palette in a window, ready to work on. Saving sends it back to the file it came from. See Files and formats.
• Duplicate writes a copy into the colour picker’s folder, so you can take a palette apart without touching the original.

Right-click a row for Reveal in Finder as well. Clicking any colour inside an opened row copies it, the same as anywhere else.

When a folder goes missing

A folder on a drive that’s not mounted, or one that has been deleted, shows as offline: its section stays, tagged OFFLINE, its rows dim, and its palettes are unavailable until the folder is back. The palette count drops to what Suisai can currently see.

Moving a folder doesn’t break it. The bookmark follows it, and the Settings row shows where it is now.

To reconnect it, open Settings → Library, find the location, and use the chevron beside it. On an offline location that item reads Reconnect Folder. On one that’s working it reads Choose Folder Again… and does the same job. The same menu renames a location, reveals it in the Finder, or stops watching it.

Watched folders are read, never written to.

Rescan on demand, or on every launch. That’s a Setting. If macOS loses track of a folder you granted, Choose Folder Again re-grants it. A volume that’s offline keeps its row and says OFFLINE rather than disappearing.