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A color as an object — construct it from hex, RGB, HSL, HSV or CMYK, convert between them all, and adjust it with lighten, darken, saturate, invert and arithmetic.

Version

1.004001 zef:raku-community-modules

Depends

nothing outside the core

License

Artistic-2.0

Its own test suite

8 files, green

Checked

2026-08-28 against Raku++ 3.20.1 and Rakudo 2026.08

Where it lives

raku.land · source

Install it #

$ rakupp install Color

zef install Color writes the same store; either installer leaves the module usable by both engines.

What it is for #

The moment a program touches color — a chart, a theme, terminal output, an SVG — it needs the conversions everyone half-remembers: hex to RGB, RGB to HSL, "this but darker". This module is those conversions as one object. Feed Color.new whatever notation you have; ask it for whichever you need:

use Color;

my $c = Color.new('#ff8800');
say ~$c;
say $c.rgb;
say $c.to-string('rgb');
say $c.to-string('hsl');
say Color.new(:hsl[210, 80, 40]).to-string('hex');
say Color.new(r => 255, g => 136, b => 0) eqv $c;

#FF8800
(255 136 0)
rgb(255, 136, 0)
hsl(32, 100, 50)
#1466B7
True

A color stringifies to its hex form, .rgb/.hsl/.hsv/.cmyk return the numbers, and .to-string renders the CSS-ready spellings. The last two lines show construction going the other way — from an HSL triple, and from named RGB parts — and that the same color is the same color, however it was written down.

This, but darker #

The manipulation methods are why the object beats a hex string in your config. Each returns a new Color, so a base color can fan out into a palette without mutating anything:

use Color;

my $brand = Color.new('#ff8800');
say $brand.darken(20).to-string('hex');
say $brand.lighten(20).to-string('hex');
say $brand.desaturate(50).to-string('hex');
say $brand.invert.to-string('hex');

#995100
#FFB766
#BF833F
#0077FF

darken/lighten move the HSL lightness by so many percentage points, saturate/desaturate do the same for saturation, and invert flips every channel — the four operations that turn one brand color into hover, muted and contrast variants.

Color arithmetic #

The Color::Operators module (loaded with the class) overloads the arithmetic operators, clipping at the channel boundaries rather than wrapping:

use Color;

say (Color.new('#404040') * 2).to-string('hex');
say (Color.new('#ff8800') + Color.new('#0000ff')).to-string('hex');

#808080
#FF88FF

Addition saturates — FF + 00 stays FF — which is what you want when mixing toward white. There is an alpha channel too (.a, hex forms hex8/hex4), left out of the arithmetic by default; setting .alpha-math = True opts it in per color.

Where the two engines differ #

Nothing on this page. Every constructor spelling, all four conversion targets, the manipulation methods and the operator overloads answer identically under Raku++ and Rakudo — including the misfit case: a constructor call that matches no candidate (say, :h/:s/:l as separate named arguments instead of :hsl[…]) is rejected by both engines alike.

What was run to put this page here #

1. Parse — every file of the distribution is parsed by Raku++ itself.
2. Install — rakupp install Color; it depends on nothing outside the core.
3. Test — the distribution's own suite: 8 files, green.
4. Run — every example on this page, twice under each engine, as the site is built.

The suite is a workout in disguise: sixteen multi method new candidates dispatching on names, positionals and where-constrained arrays, plus a sub-proto layer for the conversions — thirteen distributions depend on it, and its going green says multi-dispatch with coercion types agrees between the engines down to which call is refused.