OVERVIEW

IE-R is a color picker and daemon for Linux. It lives in your system tray, activates via hotkey, and puts the color under your cursor into your clipboard instantly.

This is the resurrection of the original "Instant Eyedropper" tool, which has served users for over 20 years. Now it's a native Wayland app written from scratch in Rust. Same idea — but with everything users asked for over two decades finally built in.

HOW IT WORKS
01
Press your hotkey (or click the tray icon). A magnifier appears over your screen.
02
Point at a pixel, click — the color is in your clipboard in whatever format you need.
03
You paste. That's the basic loop.

But there's more to the operational loop:

Input Device Resolution & Behavior
LMB / EnterPick color under cursor and copy to clipboard
MMB / SpaceAdd color to stash deck without closing overlay
ScrollAdjust the zoom level
↑ ↓ ← →Pixel-perfect nudge (1px grid targeting)
Shift + ArrowsJump to the next distinct color
Alt + ScrollModify the sampling area size
Shift + ScrollAdjust magnifier size
Ctrl + ScrollAdjust font size
1 ... 0Hot-swap string format templates on the fly
~Show/Hide Head-Up-Display (HUD) with tooltips
Esc / RMBCancel and close overlay
FEATURES
  • MULTI-MONITOR — Any number of screens, mixed resolutions, fractional scaling (e.g. 1.25x)
  • HIDPI NATIVE — Direct access to the physical pixel grid without interpolation or scaling artifacts.
  • STASH DECK — Unlimited sequential picks, accumulated in a stack
  • PRECISION CONTROL — 1px targeting for exact color isolation on high-density grids
  • HYPER JUMP — Intelligent boundary detection that navigates to the next distinct color
  • DYNAMIC APERTURE — Fluid adjustment of the zoom level to maintain focus on fine details
  • AREA SAMPLING — Regional color extraction with averaging for textured or noisy screen surfaces
  • COLOR FORMATS — 10 standard templates and fully customizable string generation
  • COMMAND LINE — Headless sampling, atomic batches, stdin streams, layout and history as TSV
  • RUNTIME TWEAKS — Adjust magnifier and font size on the fly
  • HOTKEYS — System-wide activation, configurable global shortcuts or UNIX signals
  • CONFIG ENGINE — Single TOML file. Preserves comments on save
  • SYSTEM TRAY — Color history, format selection, and config access
COMMAND LINE

Since v0.1.2 the picker also works without the overlay. Scripts can sample a coordinate directly, send a batch or a stream, and route the result wherever they need it.

SAMPLE A COORDINATE
ie-r --pixel 320,180

No overlay at all. Roughly 20 ms on wlroots compositors.

BATCH AND STREAM
ie-r --pixels "10,10;80,90"
cat coords.txt | ie-r --stdin

A batch is atomic — one capture, N samples. A stream takes one snapshot by default; --rt recaptures per line.

ONE-SHOT PICK
ie-r --pick -c

The overlay you know, as a one-shot: pick, it prints, it copies, it exits.

LAYOUT AND HISTORY
ie-r --monitors
ie-r --history -n 10

Monitor layout as TSV for scripts that need to reason about screens; saved colors straight from disk.

Results route independently to --clipboard, --history and --swatch, with explicit exit codes. Full reference: docs/cli.md →

ARCHITECTURE & PERFORMANCE

IE-R talks directly to Wayland protocols with zero GPU overhead. Capture efficiency is tiered based on your compositor capabilities:

TIER 1: WLR SCREENCOPY Hyprland, Sway, wlroots ~10-30ms
TIER 2: KWIN SCREENSHOT2 KDE Plasma (KWin) ~30-50ms
TIER 3: XDG PORTAL Universal Fallback ~500ms+
INSTALLATION

Deployment options for the current development phase:

NIX (FLAKES) // RECOMMENDED
nix run github:miaupaw/ie-r

To install permanently into your profile:

nix profile install github:miaupaw/ie-r
ARCH LINUX (AUR)
yay -S ie-r

The PKGBUILD installs the binary, .desktop file, and icon to standard system paths. KWin authorization works out of the box.

APPIMAGE

Single self-contained file — no installation:

chmod +x ie-r-v*.AppImage && ./ie-r-v*.AppImage

On first launch it installs its .desktop entry and icons into ~/.local/share/, pointing them at the AppImage's current location. Move the file later and the next launch updates the entry.

PORTABLE BUNDLE

Download latest .zip from Releases, then run integration script:

unzip ie-r-v*.zip && cd ie-r && ./postinstall.sh

postinstall.sh installs the .desktop file and icon into ~/.local/share/, offers to add IE-R to autostart, and authorizes fast capture on KWin. The bundle is self-contained — it ships its own libraries and runs on any x86_64 Linux.

SOURCE BUILD

Requires Rust 1.85+ (edition 2024) and wayland-client, libxkbcommon, dbus, fontconfig, libx11.

git clone https://github.com/miaupaw/ie-r && cd ie-r && cargo build --release

Run the binary:

./target/release/ie-r
POST-INSTALL CONFIGURATION
KDE PLASMA: ENABLING FAST CAPTURE

KWin ScreenShot2 requires a .desktop file with a special key to authorize direct capture. Without it, IE-R falls back to slow XDG Portal (~500ms). For manual builds:

sudo cp assets/ie-r.desktop /usr/share/applications/ie-r.desktop && sudo sed -i 's|Exec=ie-r|Exec=/usr/bin/ie-r|' /usr/share/applications/ie-r.desktop
SYSTEM ICON
sudo cp assets/ie-r.svg /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/ie-r.svg && gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/hicolor/
WAYLAND HOTKEY INTEGRATION

Wayland blocks global input capture. Bind these commands to your compositor shortcuts:

pkill -SIGUSR1 ie-r # activate color picker
pkill -SIGUSR2 ie-r # open color history menu

Hyprland (hyprland.conf):

bind = ALT SHIFT, C, exec, pkill -SIGUSR1 ie-r

Sway (config):

bindsym Alt+Shift+c exec pkill -SIGUSR1 ie-r
AUTOSTART

To launch IE-R automatically on login:

cp ~/.local/share/applications/ie-r.desktop ~/.config/autostart/
TECHNICAL REFERENCE
CONFIGURATION FILE

All settings (colors, physics, hotkeys) are stored in a single TOML file that preserves your comments:

~/.config/ie-r/config.toml
LICENSE & SOURCE

IE-R is source-available. Free for individuals and small organizations. For business use, please contact the author. Full source code available on GitHub.