color

color is a small, dependency-light JavaScript library for parsing, converting, and manipulating colors across virtually every color space in common use — RGB, HSL, HSV, CMYK, HWB, LAB, LCH, HCG, ANSI16/256, and Apple RGB. It accepts CSS color strings, named colors, and plain object/array inputs, and returns an immutable Color instance that supports chained transformations.

Built on top of color-convert and color-string, it exposes manipulation helpers like lighten, darken, saturate, rotate, mix, and grayscale, plus WCAG-relevant utilities such as luminosity, contrast, and isLight/isDark for accessible UI decisions. Its small footprint and broad format coverage make it a common dependency inside design tools, CLI colorizers, and CSS preprocessing utilities.

What You Get

• Parsing of CSS strings, named colors, hex, and object/array inputs across 11 color models
• Chainable, immutable manipulation methods (lighten, darken, saturate, rotate, mix, grayscale)
• WCAG luminosity and contrast-ratio calculations for accessibility-aware color decisions
• Getters for individual channels and conversion to hex, rgb number, or CSS string output
• TypeScript type definitions shipped alongside the package

Common Use Cases

• Generating accessible text/background color pairs by computing WCAG contrast ratios
• Building design-tool or theming utilities that need to lighten/darken a base brand color
• CLI tools that colorize terminal output using ANSI16/256 color model conversions
• CSS-in-JS or preprocessing tooling that manipulates colors programmatically at build time

Under The Hood

Architecture - The library is a thin, functional wrapper (index.js) around two sibling packages — color-convert for cross-model numeric conversion and color-string for parsing/serializing CSS-syntax strings — exposing a single Color factory that stores an internal {model, color, valpha} triple and lazily converts between spaces on demand. Tech Stack - Modern ESM-only package ("type": "module") targeting Node >=18, written in plain JavaScript with shipped .d.ts type definitions, zero runtime dependencies beyond color-convert/color-string. Code Quality - Tests run via mocha with xo (ESLint preset) for linting and tsd for type-definition testing, giving both runtime and type-level coverage; the test directory covers each color model and manipulation method. API Design - The chainable, immutable API (Color('#7743CE').alpha(0.5).lighten(0.5).hsl().string()) is a well-known ergonomic pattern that keeps call sites terse while avoiding mutation surprises, though the breadth of supported color models does add some API surface to learn.