I like AnyBar. It couldn’t be simpler to put a little splash of color in your Mac’s menubar for whatever reason you want. It comes with a bunch of pretty built in colors, but what if you want your own? You can add your own images to ~/.AnyBar and it’ll happily pick them when you specify them… but who wants to create an image every time they want to use a different color. I wanted to specify any hex color and have it displayed.

I’m sure this is possible to do by modifying the source itself. You could probably GCRectMake a colorWithNamedRedComponent something or other, but I’m not really an Objective-C programmer. But I do know ImageMagick…

So I put together this little script:

#!/bin/bash

if [[ $1 == "#"* ]]; then
  HEX=${1:1}
  FILE=~/.AnyBar/$HEX@2x.png

  if [ ! -f $FILE ]; then
    convert -size 38x38 xc:none -fill "#$HEX" -draw "circle 19,19 28,19" $FILE
  fi
  COLOR=$HEX
else
  COLOR=$1
fi

echo -n $COLOR | /usr/bin/nc -4u -w0 localhost ${2:-1738};

Save it somewhere like ~/bin/anybar and make sure to chmod +x it!

It works similar to the bash alias in the project’s README, but supports specifying a custom color (prefixed with #, as hex colors are:

$ anybar red       # use the built in colors
$ anybar '#036'    # taste the rainbow!
$ anybar '#003366' # same as above...

It’s not perfect, if you compare the images generated with AnyBar’s stock images you’ll find they don’t 100% line up, but it scratched an itch and might be useful to you!