Shrink "Colors" and/or "Fonts" Palette in Apple apps?

I'm a rather devoted Apple program/app user and often find myself needing/wanting to have the Apple "Colors" palette out in Mail, TextEdit, and others.

Problem is, it's HUGE. 90% of the time I just need 1 or 2 two colors to color an email preview panel or text in the body of the email, or in TextEdit. I use the latter all the time just for quick and dirty writing, backing up a text, etc...

Is there any way to dramatically reduce the size of the "Colors" Palette? It takes up about 10% of all the real estate on my 13" MBAir, and even on my 27" desktop, it's still huge.

Ideally, I'd love for Apple to just allow frequently used text formatting tools to just be a one-click in the toolbar. If that's just a pipe dream, what about allowing us to make a tiny palette at least?

Has anyone out there found secret settings to dial this in better, or know a not-too-awful workaround? Right now, all I know to do is to push the "Colors" and "Fonts" palette offscreen. [see screenshots]

Does anyone else have any brilliant ideas?

Much obliged,

Mick

Posted on Nov 24, 2021 10:40 AM

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Mick Guinn Author

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35 points

Posted on Nov 24, 2021 1:10 PM

Thanks, Viking. Yes, I'd already done the diagonal drag on both and posted those results. It's still pretty huge at 7 square inches on my big screen.

However! I just played around with the "Colors" palette again and discovered that the "Apple" Colors can reduce the giant Crayola panel I'd been using by 70%! It now only takes up TWO square inches [see screenshot] and I can push about half of that off-screen! So that's something.

Thanks for the nudge to play around with it again. I never used that particular selection of colors because the interface was kind of ugly and I liked the larger selection, but most of the time I just need yellow and red anyway!

I'd still be interested if anyone has heard of shareware that might allow one to customize these panels.

Much Obliged!

Mick

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Shrink "Colors" and/or "Fonts" Palette in Apple apps?

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