Colors-LE: Zero Hassle Color Extraction

Pull every color out of the current file in one keystroke
CSS, SCSS, LESS, Stylus, HTML, JavaScript, TypeScript, and SVG

Useful? A star or rating is how other developers find it — ★ GitHub · ★ Open VSX · ★ Marketplace

What it does

Open a file, press Ctrl+Alt+C (Cmd+Alt+C on Mac), and every color in the document lands in a new editor — deduplicate, sort, convert, filter, analyze, or validate it from there. Works in VS Code and in VS Code–based editors like Cursor and VSCodium (installable from Open VSX).

• Palette auditing — every hex, rgb()/rgba(), hsl()/hsla(), and named color in stylesheets, markup, and code
• Design-system review — analyze distribution, cluster similar colors, spot near-duplicates
• Accessibility checks — contrast ratios against WCAG AA/AAA via the Validate command

Install

Use it from an AI agent

The same engine runs as an MCP server, so an agent can call it directly instead of you running a command.

extract_colors(content, format?, filename?, dedupe?, maxResults?)

Returns every color with its notation and 1-based line and column, capped at 500 by default with meta.truncated so a large stylesheet cannot flood the agent's context window.

The server takes content and returns data — it reads no files and makes no network requests of its own. Published as colors-le-mcp on npm and as io.github.nolindnaidoo/colors-le in the MCP registry.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "colors-le": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "colors-le-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

npm install -g colors-le-mcp

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "colors-le": { "command": "colors-le-mcp" }
  }
}

echo '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list"}' | npx -y colors-le-mcp

Supported formats

No document is refused. A language with no reader of its own is read as raw text, and metadata.fileType says which of the two answered.

Recognized syntax: #rgb, #rgba, #rrggbb, #rrggbbaa, comma-form rgb()/rgba()/hsl()/hsla() (calls may span multiple lines), and the CSS named colors including rebeccapurple and transparent. Positions are real 1-based line/column of each literal. Comments never produce colors, and comment markers inside strings don't start comments.

Known limitations (documented, not bugs): modern space-separated syntax (rgb(255 0 0 / 50%)) and lab()/lch()/oklch()/color() are not extracted; a hex inside any JS string matches, including URL fragments; Stylus values without : or = only yield hex/functional literals, not named colors; in the raw-text scan a value segment runs to the end of the line, so two tokens on one line cost the named one.

The CLI

The same extraction from a terminal or a CI step — a Rust CLI in crate/, installed with cargo install colors-le. Convert, analyze and validate are interactive and stay in the editor.

colors-le .                              # every colour in the tree
colors-le --palette brand.txt .          # what is not in the palette
colors-le --values --dedupe . | sort -u  # write the palette in the first place
colors-le mcp                            # the same extraction over MCP on stdio

Exit codes: 0 clean, 1 none found or a colour outside the palette, 2 the question was malformed.

Matched by colour, not by spelling. A palette written in hex still catches a violation written in rgb(), because #FFF, #ffffff and rgb(255, 255, 255) are one entry. Alpha is part of the identity, and a named colour is only equal to itself — white and #ffffff are the same pixel and not the same decision.

Commands

Settings