Fill and Stroke Colors with the Colors Panel

Setting a fill in IconVectors used to be a trip through the Control Bar's Fill menu and the color dialog. In 2.0+ the Colors panel does it in one click, and the mouse button you press decides where the color goes: left for Fill, right for Stroke. The panel keeps a color of its own, so you can prepare the next color while the selection keeps the current one.

This guide covers the COLORS page of the panel, the quick colors, the Recent row, and how the PALETTES page fits in. It is written for IconVectors 2.0+ on Windows; the macOS and Linux builds are coming soon.

1. Open the Colors pane

Choose View -> Colors. The pane has two pages. PALETTES is the palette selector, its commands and the swatches you know from earlier versions. COLORS is the new fast picker. Both share one rule for the mouse: left-click applies to Fill, right-click applies to Stroke, wherever you click a color.

2. Define a color

The COLORS page owns one defined color, and everything on the page shows that same color: the big Saturation/Value field, the Hue strip beside it, the value editor and the large swatch on the Select row. Drag or click in the field to set saturation (left to right) and brightness (top to bottom), and click or drag on the strip to set the hue. A single click changes only the defined color; nothing on the canvas moves yet.

Pick HEX, RGB or HSL in the mode list to edit the same color as numbers. Switching modes converts the display, not the color. The value field selects its text when it gets focus, so you can type over it, and with the Hue strip focused the Up and Down keys nudge the hue by one degree, wrapping at the ends. The picker works in solid sRGB and has no alpha; opacity stays where it was, on the Control Bar.

3. Apply it to Fill or Stroke

Select an element, then left-click the large swatch on the Select row to fill it with the defined color, or right-click the swatch to use it as the stroke. If you are already in the field, a double-left-click picks the spot and applies it to Fill in one go, and a double-right-click does the same for Stroke.

The defined color does not follow the selection. Select another element, switch documents, change a color from the Control Bar, or undo and redo, and the picker still shows the color you prepared. That is the point: set the color once, then click through five elements, left or right, and they all get it.

4. Use the quick colors

The Select row ends with four fixed choices. White and Black apply those colors. None removes the paint from Fill or Stroke, which is how you turn a filled shape into an outline-only one, or drop a stroke you no longer want. [C] applies the SVG currentColor value instead of a fixed color, so the icon takes its color from the text around it in the page or app that uses it. None of the four changes the defined color or the Recent row.

This is what [C] writes into the file:

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 24 24" width="24" height="24">
  <path fill="currentColor" d="M4 4h16v16H4z"/>
</svg>

With fill="currentColor" the icon inherits the CSS color of its parent, so one file works in a light theme and a dark theme. The themeable icons tutorial covers the CSS side.

5. Reuse recent colors

Every time you apply the defined color from the large swatch, it goes to the front of the Recent row, or moves back to the front if it was already there. Clicking a Recent swatch applies that color (left for Fill, right for Stroke) without loading it into the picker and without reordering the row, so the color you are preparing stays put. The quick colors and the palette swatches do not feed Recent; only the defined color does.

6. Keep palettes on the PALETTES page

Palettes did not go away; they moved into the same pane. The PALETTES page has the palette list and its commands: Add, Remove, Rename, Sort Swatches, Add Icon Colors, Load and Save. Add Icon Colors collects every color used in the current icon, removes the duplicates, sorts them by hue and adds them to the selected palette, which is the quickest way to build a palette from an icon set you already have. Swatches follow the same click rule as everything else, left for Fill and right for Stroke, and you can drag them to reorder.

What the pane does not do

The picker is for solid colors. Gradients still come from the Control Bar's Fill and Stroke menus, including Auto Gradient, which turns a flat color into a same-tone gradient in one step. Alpha is not in the picker either. And because the defined color is deliberately independent, the pane never shows you the color of the selected element; the Control Bar swatches do.

If you want to try it, download the IconVectors 2.00 trial for Windows, open View -> Colors, and give one element a fill with a left-click and a stroke with a right-click.