If you need a color picker regularly enough but not every five minutes, keeping a widget on your panel 24/7 may be overkill.

I prefer a global hotkey that triggers a picker and stays hidden otherwise. And we can hook right into the default KDE color picker, no need for additional packages.

the default widget is minimalist, but still distracting

The Solution: KWin D-Bus

We can do this by tapping directly into the KWin compositor using D-Bus. It’s fast and just works.


dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.kde.KWin /ColorPicker org.kde.kwin.ColorPicker.pick

This will run the color picker. Pick a spot and click. As you will see it returns a uint32 (a big number), and we’ll need to convert that to a Hex code in the next step.

The One-Liner

For Wayland:


dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.kde.KWin /ColorPicker org.kde.kwin.ColorPicker.pick | awk '/uint32/ {printf "#%06x\n", $2 % 16777216}' | wl-copy

This will run the color picker, convert the uint32 to hex and shove it straight into your clipboard, ready to be pasted.

For X11:
Swap wl-copy for xclip -selection clipboard.

Set the Global Hotkey

Don’t wrap this in a shell script unless you have to. KDE can handle this natively:

  • Open System Settings > Shortcuts.
  • Go to Commands and click Add New.
  • Name: Global Color Picker.
  • Command: Paste the one-liner above.
  • Shortcut: Assign your favorite combo (e.g., Meta+Shift+C).
  • Hit Apply.

And there you go. No wasted visual space. Just instant color pickings whenever you need it.

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