Pika

Pika is an open-source, native colour picker for macOS from Super High Fives. It samples colours anywhere on screen and keeps foreground and background colours together for design and accessibility work.

Colour workflow

Choose Hex, RGB, HSB, HSL, LAB, OpenGL or OKLCH output. Keyboard shortcuts pick and copy foreground or background values, open the system colour picker, switch formats and swap colours. Undo and redo let you revisit picks; history and colour preview are available from dedicated controls.

Contrast and interface

Pika 1.8.0 adds a menu-bar popover mode and one-flow foreground/background contrast picking. WCAG and APCA contrast ratings can appear side by side. Version 1.9.0 adds window-shadow control to prevent the shadow influencing nearby sampled colours and an adaptive compact window with an Expand to fit button.

Automation and installation

The pika:// URL scheme supports picking, copying, setting hex colours, changing formats, toggling history/compliance/preview and controlling window appearance. For example, pika://pick/foreground/hex samples a foreground colour in Hex format. Install using brew install --cask pika or download the official DMG. The recorded Homebrew cask requires macOS 14 or newer.

Sources

• https://superhighfives.com/pika
• https://github.com/superhighfives/pika
• https://github.com/superhighfives/pika/releases/tag/1.9.0
• https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/blob/HEAD/Casks/p/pika.rb