K’uychi is a desktop colour palette generator designed for developers, interface designers, and anyone who needs a coherent range of related tones.
Rather than functioning as a conventional screen eyedropper, it starts with a user-selected base colour and generates lighter and darker variants around it. The program uses the OKLab colour space for this process, helping the resulting steps appear more perceptually uniform than simple arithmetic adjustments to RGB values.
Its compact GTK and libadwaita interface is designed to fit naturally into the GNOME desktop. The name K’uychi means “rainbow” in Quechua.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Generates a complete shade scale from a single base colour.
- Uses OKLab calculations to create perceptually consistent lighter and darker tones.
- Displays the generated palette immediately when the source colour changes.
- Copies any generated shade to the clipboard with a single action.
- Outputs colours as hexadecimal values suitable for CSS, UI work, and design applications.
- Supports opening multiple application windows when several palettes need to be compared.
- Uses GTK 4 and libadwaita for a responsive GNOME-style graphical interface.
- Follows the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.
- Uses colorjs.io for colour manipulation and shade generation.
- Runs locally without requiring an online palette-generation service.
- Includes application shortcuts through libadwaita’s shortcuts interface.
Website: codeberg.org/nyx_lyb3ra/kuychi
Support:
Developer: Naiara Gomez Castro
License: Blue Oak Model License 1.0.0
K’uychi is written in TypeScript and uses GJS. Learn TypeScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
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| walrs | Build themes from an image’s dominant colours |
| Aether | Customise and coordinate desktop themes visually |
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| Tinct | Extract reusable palettes from images |
| clrsync | Synchronise themes across applications |
| rong | Extract Material You colours from images |
| Colorway | Discover complementary colour pairings |
| Colorice | Wallpaper-driven colour scheme generator |
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