In Issue #3674, it has been requested to have the possibility to select a color for the current layer directly from the palette, after its creation, which would be great.
At the origin, it is about to add a tab in the Color dialog, but there could be drawbacks/bugs and would require a lot of clicks to access it (see the Issue comments for reasons).
What I propose is to add an entry in the context menu on the Palette to apply the current selected Layer (if it has a Color property).
Or even a shortcut like Ctrl+Click, the Ctrl key acting as a “safety” to avoid to mess accidentally the current color)
(left-click assigns current backgrouns/fill color, middle-click assigns current foreground color)
But why can’t we have color palette in the color picker dialog? For an artist, having color palette in the color picker dialog is really convenient, this is the reason why color pickers in famous art programs have this feature, be it Krita, GIMP, Photoshop, Animate, etc.
A 4th tab in the Color Picker (that needs a revamp ) AND a 4th entry in the context menu of palette color.
Now I’ll discuss about the possibility of recursive color-picker opening mentioned by BobSynfig.
First, for those who could anticipate this problem before, the palette panel let user right click on a color and, via its context menu, user could edit that color opening the Color Picker dialog. That would have a Palette tab. And user could try to edit one of its color, by clicking on the item of palette color context menu and then (other/again) opening a Color Pick dialog. And that would have a Color Picker dialog with a Palette tab and so on…
However, the Color Picker dialog on Synfig is a singleton, i.e. there is only one Color Picker ever. Indeed, it is create on app launch and it is the only one in the entire application life. When you close this dialog, you are actually just hiding it, not destroyed (i.e. not freed from memory, only when app finishes).
That said, I think everything will work fine if we won’t let user edit the palette colors in the new Palette tab in the Color Picker dialog. And, in this same situation, should not allow the mouse action of changing the background/fill and foreground/outline default color, like highlighted by BobSynfig:
Maybe the palette widget should have two usage modes:
Simple color selection, done by left-clicking on a palette item
Regular palette usage as done in the Palette Panel
) AND a 4th entry in the context menu of palette color.