Palette Plus is a time saving custom editor window tool which allows you to define an assortment of colors that you plan to use commonly within your project, from this defined palette, you can generate a Palette script which you can use to easily access your assortment of colours in code. You can also generate Swatches from your defined palette that you can use in Unity's color selector so you can easily set up a parity for use of colors in both code and in the editor color selector.

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Getting Started

You can launch the interface by going to “Window/Tools/Palette Plus” in Unity.

Click the 'Add Color Button' to add a color to the palette.
Now select a color you want to use from Unity's Color selector popup.
With 'Auto Search Names' toggled on, an appropriate name will populate the name field, this name is identified by thecolorapi.com which identifies 2000+ colours, the closest match will be selected as the name.

You can manually name your colour in the textbox, the name must be alpha numeric, starting with a capital letter. The textbox will auto validate for the acceptable characters.

To manually search for the name from thecolorapi.com, click the 'S' button. To remove a color from the palette, press the '-' button.

Generating Scripts

Enter in the namespace textbox a distinguishable name related to what this color palette will be for. The name must be alpha numeric, starting with a capital letter. The textbox will auto validate for the acceptable characters.

Now that you have at least 1 color in your palette, with a valid name and a valid name in the namespace textbox. Click the Generate Script button, this will open up a Save File Panel. The default name for the script is Palette which is what we recommend since it is easy to remember, the name you entered in the namespace textbox is how you will differentiate between your Palette scripts. 

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Choose where you would like to save your Palette script and click Save. You will find 2 items will be created, the Palette Script and a palette asset which is named after what name was present in the namespace textbox.

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This palette asset represents your custom palette you created, it can be used as a shortcut by double clicking it to open the Palette Plus window with your defined colors so you can easily update your palette any time later.

We are now ready to use our generated Palette script. To use our script we must declare its implementation with the 'using' directive.

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In the video example on line 4 we declare it with:

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#using UIColors;

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Where UIColors is the name of the namespace we gave it in the Palette Plus namespace textbox.

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Now when we call our new Palette class, our available colours will be displayed by the intellisense auto-completion suggestion.

Generating Swatches

When you have at least 1 color in your palette, with a valid name and a valid name in the namespace textbox. You will be able to click the Generate Swatches button, this will open up a Save File Panel. The defaulting name for the swatches .color file will be the name you entered in the namespace textbox, this is to make it so if you generate both a Palette script and Swatches, they can be easily identifed as a matching pair.

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The Swatches .color file needs to be saved in an 'Editor' folder, this allows unity to find your file for use with the built in color picker utility.

Now that our .colors file has been saved to an Editor folder, unity can locate our custom swatches palette for us to use in the color selector interface.

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To use it, open up the color selector interface by clicking on any editor item which will allow you to select a color. In the color selector window, click on the settings button which looks like 3 vertical dots, i.e ⋮

You will now be able to select the custom Swatches pallet you have created from a list. Displaying the swatches in List View will show the names we associated with our colours.