Enter colors directly into notebook?

Question

In Mathematica notebook interface, you can evaluate:

In[1]:= Black

and you get a colored squared representing the color. Then I can copy and paste this color square and use it as input, like so:

which I find very readable. However I would like to be able to enter the blue square directly, instead of having to enter and evaluate Blue in a separate cell to get to the square.

Is there a key combination (similar to the usual Esc + a + Esc to get greek letters) to get the color boxes?

Answer 1

You can get the colour swatch to appear as follows:

1. Type the symbol Black.
2. Press and hold down the CTRL and SHIFT keys.
3. Type ← to select the previous word.
4. Type ENTER to evaluate it in place.
5. Release the modifier keys.

Answer 2

SystemDialogInput["Color"] // CopyToClipboard

Will do the Trick together with Copy/Past

Answer 3

As Kuba noted in a comment you can use the menu command Evaluation >> Evaluate in Place