Thistle is an HSL color picker. Try it out!

Inspired by Brandon Mathis's excellent hslpicker.

API

example

<script src='http://nornagon.github.com/thistle/thistle.js'></script>
<script>
  var picker = new thistle.Picker('rgb(129,34,203)')
  document.body.appendChild(picker.el)
  picker.on('changed', function() {
    document.body.style.backgroundColor = picker.getCSS()
  })
</script>

creating a picker

new thistle.Picker(color)

Creates a picker object but doesn't attach it to the DOM. You're free to put it wherever you like in your page, animate it, hide it, whatever. The argument color can be either a string representing a CSS color like #fff, mediumseagreen, hsl(34,20%,45%) or rgb(234,221,193), or an object specifying hsl components like {h:231, s:1, l:0.5}.

presenting a picker

You can add the picker to the DOM by attaching picker.el somewhere, or you can use one of the convenient presentModal methods instead.

picker.presentModalBeneath(element)

Adds the picker to the DOM, animates it into being just underneath element, and creates a modalness that means if the user clicks anywhere except inside the picker, the picker will be dismissed.

picker.presentModal(x, y)

Just like picker.presentModalBeneath, but you get to choose the precise x,y coordinates at which the picker will appear.

events

Once you have created your picker object, you can listen to events on it.

picker.on('changed', function() { ... })

Fired when the user changes the color. To figure out what the current color is, use one of the color getters described below (getCSS() is a pretty handy one.)

picker.on('closed', function() { ... })

If you present the picker modally, you can listen to the 'closed' event to be notified when the user dismisses the picker.

properties

To fetch the current color of the picker, you can enquire with any of picker.getRGB(), picker.getHSL() or picker.getCSS().

• picker.getRGB() returns an object like {r:0.5, g:0.3, b:0.9}.
• picker.getHSL() returns an object like {h:180, s:0.5, l:0.5}.
• picker.getCSS() will return a string describing the color in CSS format (e.g. 'hsl(300, 24%, 80%)'), which you can assign to, say, element.style.backgroundColor.

You can also set the colors using the related setRGB(), setHSL() and setCSS() methods.

picker.setCSS('mintcream')
picker.setCSS('#d8bfd8')
picker.setRGB(1.0, 0.4, 0.0)
picker.setHSL(45, 0.9, 0.6)

Amusingly, 'thistle' is a valid CSS color.