Is there a way for pastel to find the nearest 256-palette colour to a 24-bit one?

[eggbean]

For example, I would like to find the closest 256-palette colour to #dc143c.

I tried this, which worked:

$ PASTEL_COLOR_MODE=8bit
$ pastel color dc143c

And then used a colour picker on the output to get #FF307D.

Is there a better way than this?

[sharkdp]

You can use pastel format ansi-8bit or pastel format ansi-8bit-escapecode:

❯ pastel format ansi-8bit dc143c                
\x1b[38;5;197m

or

❯ CODE=$(pastel format ansi-8bit-escapecode dc143c)
❯ echo "${CODE}HELLO\x1b[0m"   
HELLO

You can also use pastel paint in combination with -m/--mode (or PASTEL_COLOR_MODE) to directly paint something in that color:

❯ pastel -m 8bit paint black --on dc143c "WARNING"

I don't think #FF307D is the right answer. If I follow your process, I get #cc004c (which I believe is more similar to #dc143c). Did you forget to export PASTEL_COLOR_MODE?

[eggbean]

Thanks. I am get #DC143C. translated to #FF307D, which is colour197 in the terminal 256-colour index on my system. I assumed only the first 16 ANSI colours change with terminal themes and the rest of the palette was always the same.

I used the method I posted above to find the closest 256 palette colours to some 24-bit colours:

original 24bit	nearest 8bit	terminal-256
#5B7CE5	#5F87D7	colour68
#4169E1	#005FFF	colour27
#132C76	#000087	colour18
#FA8072	#FF8787	colour210
#69E141	#5FD700	colour76
#DC143C	#FF005F	colour197

Seems to work fine.

Does #CC004C come up for colour197 when you use a colour picker?

I used this script to get the terminal colours:

 /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gawin/bash-colors-256/master/colors)"

[sharkdp]

Does #CC004C come up for colour197 when you use a colour picker?

yes

I assumed only the first 16 ANSI colours change with terminal themes and the rest of the palette was always the same.

Looks like they can be modified too :facepalm:

[sharkdp]

I guess this can be closed?