The Label List allows me to select a color to associate with a given label - this is incredibly useful. However, I need to track other metadata and would like to create a Custom Metadata List and also assign colors to it. I don’t see a way to do this.
I understand that Text can have a color assigned to it, but that would not work for my situation as I want to select (for example): “Easy”, “Medium”, “Hard” and have each of these display in a different color, or have a colored icon immediately to the right as in the Label List.
There is only a List custom metadata tool, not one that has the capacity to store an associated colour along with a text label. There is a feature request for such a thing already.
By the way, I wouldn’t underestimate the Keyword tool as a secondary colour-coding tool. Unlike a hypothetical custom metadata field type, which wouldn’t feasibly have any display in the user interface outside of the Inspector and Outliner, keywords can be displayed in the Corkboard too, as well as the Outliner. Marking the “difficulty” for a section strikes me as a good use case for keywords.
You can have up to 16 custom colors for comments. You could coordinate with keyword colors and even assign keywords to custom metadata as a way to have visual color cue.