I have been searching on the web and I can't find this. What is the meaning of the color of the node sockets in the node editor?
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$\begingroup$ This information can be found in the manual: blender.org/manual/editors/node_editor/… They are called sockets. $\endgroup$ – juFo Sep 23 '15 at 15:25
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$\begingroup$ Related: Cycles - (Shader) Nodes - inputs outputs - What are the exact data types? $\endgroup$ – user1853 Mar 7 '18 at 17:20
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Grey is a single value
Yellow is a tuple containing 3 values; the red, green, and blue channels of a color.
Purple is a tuple containing 3 values. Used for vector/coordinate information.
Green is a shader closure, representing a description of how light will interact with a surface or volume. This one can only be connected into other green sockets.
Note that these will be converted to/from each other automatically as much as possible:
Yellow and purple can be connected to each other without any loss of information (under the hood they are pretty much the same).
Grey can be connected to yellow or purple without any loss of information (all three values in the tuple will the same value)
Yellow and purple can be connected to gray, but will be converted to a single grayscale value:
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1$\begingroup$ I would say that it's blue, not purple, but maybe that's just my color scheme (#6363c7).. And I would summarize the blue nodes as "vector/coordinate" information since they are used for UV and normal information. $\endgroup$ – Mutant Bob Jul 13 '15 at 21:32
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$\begingroup$ @MutantBob Mine are the same color, but for whatever reason they look purple to me. Added note about vector/coordinate information $\endgroup$ – gandalf3♦ Jul 13 '15 at 21:46
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$\begingroup$ I found this by searching "node editor gray purple". $\endgroup$ – AndreKR Sep 22 '19 at 7:29
