The Irix Color Palette#

Irix is an “architectonic” color palette system based on Radix colors — five chambers of four hues each, with twelve named shades per hue — and a set of CLI tools to apply it to the local system.

The palette itself ships as YAML data inside the package, in dark and light variants. On top of that data sit three small layers, from most- to least-general:

  • Palette loads a palette variant from packaged (or arbitrary) YAML and resolves hue names, hue-shade expressions, or raw hex values into concrete hex color strings.

  • Color addresses a single palette entry by integer chamber, hue, and shade indices, with flexible string-based construction.

  • ColorCoder (console script colorcode) drives the terminal background color from directory and command triggers evaluated at every shell prompt.

Alongside those, a small standalone toolbox (promptcode, kittyhud, themecode) applies the same palette to prompts, a Kitty HUD, and foreign editor themes; and the irix console script is a deploy engine in its own right — it lists, generates, drift-checks, and deploys palette-derived artifacts (kitty/alacritty/VSCode/Rust/CSS/…) for every registered target, driven by a small policy/mechanism split (see Architecture: How Irix Is Put Together).

Usage#

uv tool install irix     # provides the `colorcode` console script
colorcode -d "$PWD"      # apply the color triggered by the current directory
colorcode -c slate       # set an explicit hue immediately

irix targets             # list every registered deploy target
irix check                # drift-check rendered artifacts against out/
irix deploy kitty vscode  # copy selected artifacts to their local config destinations

Contents#

Tutorial#

How-to Guides#

Explanation#

Reference#